The Rocky Mountain Front blueshttps://www.hcn.org/issues/45.11/the-rocky-mountain-front-blues
A journalist reflects on energy development on his home turf.Augusta, Montana

Nine years ago this May, my wife, Holly, and I bought an old house in Augusta, aiming to live and raise our children in a landscape and a culture -- the two are inseparable -- that we respect. About 20 miles west of town, the fierce wall of geology known as the Rocky Mountain Front leaps from the wide grassy plain, the backdrop to every day, whether good or bad. The Bob Marshall and Scapegoat Wilderness Complex -- protecting 1.5 million acres of mountains, well-grassed valleys and forest -- beckons at the end of teeth-cracking washboard gravel roads.

Tiny Augusta, with fewer than 300 residents, is the hub for the big ranches around it, with a grocery store, a gas station and four bars. Elk Creek runs through our town (and sometimes floods it), connecting us to the wildness of the mountains from which it is born; in mid-June last year, two adolescent grizzly bears were seen cavorting in a neighbor's backyard. Outfitting -- autumn hunting and summer pack trips into the wilderness -- is also part of the town's economy, and its image. It's a conservative, community-oriented town, where the rough edges and the older values of the West still hold: self-reliance, tolerance for eccentricity, the willingness to pitch in to help a neighbor in need. Augusta has been very good to us and to our children.

One cold night in March 2012, I was driving my son and daughter home from Little Guy Wrestling practice in Choteau, another ranch and farming town whose 1,700 residents make it the largest settlement along the 200-mile-long Front. The late winter sky blazed with stars and the snow in the coulees glowed like bleached bones in the moonlight. To the west, we could see the bulk of Ear Mountain (made famous in A.B. Guthrie's classic novel, The Big Sky), its outline a black arc against a sky not yet completely dark. I thought, not for the first time: The Front is a landscape of wind and space that I love more than any other.

But that night, for the first time in the years we've made that drive, there were oil-drilling rigs out there on the plain, lit up like Christmas trees, surrounded by a wash of halogen lights, a shaky set of bright headlights bucking down an access road. We'd seen the big pickups with Colorado plates at the ExxonMobil station in Choteau, noticed the piles of surveying stakes outside the Stage Stop Inn, overheard the talk of boom, lease fortunes and skyrocketing rents. We knew that modern energy development, or at least exploration, had arrived. But it wasn't until we saw those glaring rigs lighting the night that we really understood what it meant.

The oil and gas industry has sought riches for more than a hundred years around here. The Lewis Overthrust, running from Alberta southeast into Montana, forming the Front, is such a classic visible example of the earth's shiftings and buryings that it has inspired generations of hydrocarbon seekers and visionaries. But while the famously jumbled geology -- the Disturbed Belt, some call it -- has promised much, with a few exceptions (a well west of Choteau at Blackleaf Canyon produced around 7 billion cubic feet of natural gas before being capped in the late 1980s) the result has been lots of dry and marginal holes. The first wells were drilled in the early 1900s near natural petroleum seeps in an area that's now part of Glacier National Park, on the Front's northern edge. Early- to mid-20th century oil and gas fields abound from east of ultra-tiny Dupuyer all the way to the Canadian border above the Sweetgrass Hills.

Hard-fought political battles from the 1940s to the '70s created our huge wilderness complex, and only after those battles were settled did the leasing of unprotected land become controversial. In recent decades, even during the drilling-intoxicated George W. Bush presidency, the trend along the Front seemed to veer again toward protection. In 2006, conservationists and their government allies completed a near-total buyout of the existing energy leases along the Front, and federal minerals up and down the mountain edge were withdrawn from further leasing (despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth from many locals). More recently, a surprising coalition ranging from outfitters and sportsmen to ranchers and environmentalists has negotiated the terms of the Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act, which -- if Congress ever passes it -- would basically keep federal public lands here the way they are now, with limited motorized access, a plan for controlling noxious weeds and continuing livestock grazing, along with a moderate expansion of wilderness designation for 67,000 acres of national forest. The Heritage Act has broad support from across Montana, including many locals. (Disclaimer: I'm one of them.) At a recent public meeting in Choteau with Montana's new Republican Congressman Steve Daines, 69 people signed on the "pro" Heritage Act sheet, while 16 opposed it. But such numbers, and even such meetings, can be deceptive.

In truth, most people here -- at least the vocal ones -- don't want the Front to remain in its relatively pristine condition. Bumper stickers common in Choteau say it clearly: "Save the Front. Drill it!"

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The reasons are economic, at least on the surface. Tangible arguments for development, energy or otherwise, include the Augusta school, the stately old brick building our son and daughter attend. It's a good school, but it's threatened by declining enrollment and slashed budgets. My friend, Russ Bean, who grew up on the Bean Ranch, where the Dearborn River emerges from the mountain wall, is one of many who worry that the school could close. His family's ranch dates back to the 1800s and he was the school superintendent for seven years; his wife, Terri, taught my son and daughter in first and second grade, in a class of seven or eight children. In the "all able hands on deck" way of a small community, Russ and I have worked together on the volunteer ambulance, and on other projects. He is a quietly outspoken advocate of energy development and more, not less, motorized access to the Front.

As Russ puts it, "If we had some good, high-paying jobs here without energy development, I'd say maybe we don't need it here. But we don't have those jobs. There is no economy here. The ranching lifestyle is leaving us, because nobody new can afford to ranch; rich people have come in and pushed up the price of land to where it is out of reach." He says he values the environment, but the lack of revenue is a more serious problem than any hypothetical damage from energy development. "If this (development) is done right, it can put more money into the pockets of people who work for a living, it brings people to our community, and it can keep our school open. And if the school closes, we have no community." Russ' sentiments are echoed by our current legislator, Christy Clark of Choteau (whose husband and eldest son coached my kids' wrestling team, and whose family has been here for five generations), a local newspaper editor, and by many landowners and businesspeople, from Rogers Pass on the Front's southern edge to the Canadian border.

I don't know what we'd do if the Augusta school closes. But I like this place just the way it is. I admit that I once thought everybody did. Some people will say that because I make my living as a writer, I can afford to dismiss the opportunities that energy development would bring. But as they also say of ranching, outfitting and guiding here, writing "ain't much of a living, but it's a pretty good life," as long as you love where you live. And because I know that an energy boom will forever change this place I love and have chosen for raising my family, I have reported on the consequences of energy development across the West. From New Mexico to Wyoming, I've tried to describe, as objectively as I could, the benefits, conflicts and trade-offs I've witnessed. Because I usually write for conservation and outdoor magazines, I've often concentrated on the impact of energy development on wildlife, including mule deer, elk, antelope and sage grouse. Sometimes it's the near-destruction of parts of revered and unique landscapes like Colorado's Roan Plateau or Wyoming's Red Desert or the pollution of watersheds like the Tongue River in Wyoming and Montana. The impacts are indisputable.

Aldo Leopold said it best: "One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds." My own "ecological education" comes mostly from being a serious hunter and fisherman and biophile, or -- as my friends called me in our youth -- a "nature freak." I have sought out the places where what fascinates me the most is most intact. But as anybody who loves the rural West knows, that fascination is not usually shared, at least not in the same way, by all who spend their lives there. Most of my friends and neighbors, who welcomed my family to this town, don't "live alone in a world of wounds" when they're working on or visiting the local ranches and farms. They see nothing wrong with having more economic opportunities, and if that means more roads, more people, more industry, so much the better. They certainly do not celebrate the loss of human population and the resurgence of the grizzly, the wolf or the sandhill crane. Instead, they celebrate the economically vibrant (and ecologically destructive) past years of settlement and boom.

I write this essay from a back room in an old insurance office that closed in the 1970s. Next door was the movie theater. Across the street was the office of the Augusta News, last published in the 1950s. The fact that most of the rest of the world is now replete with movie theaters and insurance offices, that across the planet the crowded vibrancy of commerce and human endeavor has reached the level of a shriek, does not change the view that a loss of human population here represents decline.

Many would welcome an energy boom, and on the Blackfeet Reservation, whose border touches Glacier National Park, they have already done so, with mixed results. While some tribal members were appalled at the idea of industrializing landscapes near sacred sites, others hoped that leasing land for energy development would bring more cash and jobs to a reservation that has 69 percent unemployment and a poverty rate conservatively put at 39 percent. As I write this, billionaire Philip Anschutz's Exploration Corporation, which held about 600,000 acres of leases on the Blackfeet Reservation, has announced plans to abandon its efforts there for now, after drilling 14 exploratory wells. South of the reservation, Fairways Exploration and Production (motto: "High Impact Exploration is Fairways' Business!") has recently drilled two exploratory wells on the spectacular Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Ranch, a 6,300-acre property owned by the Boone and Crockett Club, and dedicated to wildlife research, hunting and conservation. New drilling is occurring near Augusta, and exploration, especially for natural gas, is unabated.

Although federal lands are not open for leasing in the narrow six-mile band where the mountains meet the prairies, leasing of state, private and reservation ground -- which together comprise the vast majority of the Front east of the mountains -- has been on fire. In the four counties that stretch from the Canadian border to Roger's Pass, the drillers have already leased most state lands -- well over a quarter of a million acres, along with the hundreds of thousands of acres on the reservation and the expanses of the private land that also hold some of the world's richest wildlife habitat and native grasslands.

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The Front's energy resources are nowhere as reliable and rich as the Bakken play in the Williston Basin in eastern Montana and North Dakota. The Williston's oil-producing layer is 20 to 80 feet thick, whereas the layer along the Front is around five feet thick. So the payout here would be lower than in the Bakken, and the drillers groping around the Front have to deal with very challenging geology. With natural gas prices at historic lows, because the new technologies opening shale reserves across the U.S. have created an unprecedented glut, many drilling projects are on hold. But a complex new worldwide market is taking shape. Our nation's largest export terminal for liquefied natural gas (LNG) is being built in Louisiana, a $10 billion project, to ship to Korea, Japan and Spain, where the selling price is much higher than here. Federal regulators have approved another new LNG port on the Texas coast, and are considering proposals for many more, including one in Coos Bay, Ore., to export to Asian markets, using the Pacific Connector Pipeline to bring gas from the Rocky Mountains and other producing regions. There is a nationwide rush to retrofit or convert coal-fired power plants to burn the cleaner, much cheaper natural gas. The rumblings of a new U.S. transportation model can also be heard, as cars are fitted with engines that burn compressed natural gas, and trucks convert to LNG. The hue and cry of "natural gas" is on every investor's lips.

The question as to when the price of the natural gas will rebound again, triggering a new rush of drilling, has not yet been answered, but soon will be. Add new research showing that the productivity of many recent gas wells declines at an unexpectedly fast rate, and you're left with a kind of cliffhanger, with only one guarantee: Wherever natural gas and oil resources have not been declared off-limits, they will be developed eventually.

A single successful oil or gas well can generate millions of dollars for the local economy along the Front, along with enormous company profits, so they will keep trying.

Since I began reporting on energy issues, the greatest change I have witnessed has come in our attitudes, across the U.S. Generally, the pendulum has swung away from conservation, and toward an acceptance of trade-offs in developing domestic energy resources. There has been no widespread rebellion against oil and gas, despite both the obvious and subtle environmental impacts, including climate change. When it was widely trumpeted in 2013 that the North Dakota Bakken oilfields could contain as many as 7.4 billion barrels of oil, more than anyone had imagined, no one noted that this would still only be enough to fuel the U.S. for 350 days. And that math, of course, doesn't include the fact that most of the oil will be sold on the global market. When it was reported that the same Bakken oilfields were burning off, into the atmosphere, enough natural gas every day to heat a half-million homes, simply because it wasn't "economical" to build a new pipeline, people just shrugged and went about their business.

Many would say that the U.S. has become a more pragmatic nation since the terrorist attacks of 9/11. I would say that we have lowered our expectations, abandoned our notions of efficiency and innovation, and instead accepted a model of short-term pillage and squander, not just of the energy resources with which we were blessed, but also of the landscapes that contain them. This is not an abstraction to me. I've seen it, and it is real.

As I began drafting this essay last summer, a sow grizzly killed 70 sheep in one hell-raising night east of a small town named Conrad, a long way from the mountains. She and her cub were on the move, wandering the ancestral traces on the grasslands.

A week later, my son and I set out to ride borrowed horses to White River Pass in the Bob Marshall Wilderness, to help outfitter friends shovel a path through the snow so they could bring a pack string to their camp. The drive to the trailhead was 30 miles, almost all of it gravel and washboard. We passed only four or five ranch houses between Augusta and the beginning of Forest Service land, all of them lost in a vastness of emerald prairie grass, bright yellow balsam root, purple irises in the lower, wetter ground. Antelope were everywhere, their fawns no bigger than border collies, running wild circles around their mothers. There were elk out on the prairies. (Local wisdom says that the growing number of wolves has made it impossible for the elk to calve in the backcountry public lands.)

The whole of the drive, until the mountains, was overshadowed by the strange tower of Haystack Butte, which has been a landmark for human beings here long before maps were drawn in charcoal and ochre on a scrap of buffalo or antelope hide. Haystack Butte is mostly state land, all of it leased for energy exploration. The magnificent private lands around it? They're also leased.

In a world of 7.5 billion souls and counting, in a nation that expects to add 100 million people in the next 30 years or so, all of them expecting to be warmed and fed and powered, we nature freaks, and those who associate solitude with freedom, face hard times ahead. The oil and gas may or may not lie beneath the prairies here. It may not even matter. The relentless eagerness with which so many of us, who live in this land and know it best, have embraced the quest to find the fossil fuels tells the truest, saddest story of our future.

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Hal Herring is a freelance journalist and book author based in Augusta, Montana; his previous HCN stories have focused on wolves, bison, grizzlies, predator politics, whitebark pinecone picking, and chronic wasting disease in elk, among other topics.

]]>No publisherCommunities2013/06/24 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleThe violent story of our first national park: A review of Empire of Shadowshttps://www.hcn.org/issues/44.19/the-violent-story-of-our-first-national-park-a-review-of-empire-of-shadows
George Black's book details the violent history surrounding Yellowstone National Park.Empire of Shadows: the Epic Story of YellowstoneGeorge Black548 pages, hardcover: $35. St. Martin's Press, 2012.

Whenever my country's absurd politics wear me out, I remind myself that we were the first nation to have a true national park: Yellowstone. Sometimes, I'll even drive the four hours or so south from my home to the park and simply marvel at the vast rich high-altitude caldera and its wealth of wildlife, space and cold waters. What other nation, in the late 19th century, would have had the foresight to preserve such a place? Yes, Homo sapiens clogs the nearby countryside in the summers, filling the alpine air with exhaust fumes, sewage and the stink of snack foods. But Yellowstone National Park, all 1 million or so acres of it, is larger by far than any traffic jam or even the number of corpulent tourists sent airborne on the blunt horns of a bison bull. The early Western editorialists called it "Wonderland." It was every bit of that, and it still is.

George Black, a fly-fishing writer and the editor of OnEarth magazine, has written Empire of Shadows: The Epic Story of Yellowstone, a worthy historical doorstopper detailing exactly how the park came into existence. Why was the Yellowstone caldera so mysterious, so untouched, until long after the Civil War? The answer lies with the Blackfeet Nation, whose creation story commanded the tribe to prevent any trespass on its territory, a mandate that it followed with terrifying efficiency for centuries. Intrepid scouts like Kit Carson and Jim Bridger told campfire tales of geysers, brimstone and scalding garishly colored springs, but until the Blackfeet were vanquished, the Upper Yellowstone was simply too dangerous to explore.

As Black makes clear, the history of Yellowstone is inextricable from the violence required to conquer the territory surrounding it. In the decade following the Civil War, campaigns against Indians and outlaws consumed leaders of both commerce and the military alike. Black explores a fertile territory here: These upstanding pioneers, some of the most brutal men in the history of the West, were also the leading proponents of preserving the wonders and beauties of the Yellowstone country. Among them was Nathaniel Pitt Langford of Helena, who led Montana's infamous Vigilantes, hanging the unrighteous and the suspect from the goldfields of Bannock to the windy prairies of the Sun River Valley. Lt. Gustavus Cheyney Doane, who would head the first hardscrabble expedition to explore the legends of the caldera and remain obsessed by the upper Yellowstone country for the rest of his life, commanded troops at the horrific Baker Massacre of Chief Heavy Runner's band of Blackfeet on the Marias River in the winter of 1870. Haunted and deeply intelligent, Lt. Doane is one of the West's most tragic characters, and Black deftly captures the contradictions that marked his life.

Contradiction, as Empire of Shadows makes clear, defined the nature of the West's settling from the mid-1860s through the mid-'80s. The United States was a nation in wild ferment, roiled by waves of immigrants and an increasingly corrupt, roller-coaster economy. The Civil War with its preternatural level of violence (an estimated 620,000 dead) colored every aspect of those decades. Civil War veterans like Gen. Phil Sheridan applied the "deadly arithmetic" of Sharpsburg and Chickamauga to the last recalcitrant Native Americans, issuing orders to exterminate both the bison and the Blackfeet, even while writing letters that celebrated the beauty of the forests and plains. The wholesale slaughter of wildlife was accelerated, and the first conservation movements were born almost simultaneously. As the wilderness was ruthlessly eviscerated, a new idea, that nature's wonders might be preserved rather than destroyed, swept the nation.

Once the Yellowstone region was mapped, President Ulysses S. Grant declared it a public park on March 1, 1872. Few openly opposed the declaration. Yes, the impulses were partly mercenary -- a railroad, tourism, hotels and kickbacks were already in the works -- but Black goes beyond this fascinating historical and political maelstrom to examine the more complex and enduring American impulses to both vanquish and preserve. Empire of Shadows will resonate with any reader who loves the West and hopes to preserve its Wonderlands, which still survive despite the rampant energy development, sprawling subdivisions and devouring homogeneity of modern America.

]]>No publisherRecreationBooks2012/11/12 02:00:00 GMT-7ArticleA tree-climber's tale of harvesting cones to save whitebark pineshttps://www.hcn.org/issues/43.21/a-tree-climbers-tale-of-harvesting-cones-to-save-whitebark-pines
As whitebark pines in the Northern Rockies succumb to pine beetles and blister rust, hardworking climbers defy gravity to collect pine cones from canopies to supply efforts to breed more resilient and resistant trees.You wipe the sweat out of your eyes with a sap-stiffened glove, clinging tightly with your other hand to the one live branch, thick as a hammer handle, that is keeping you up here and alive, 30 feet or so above the rocky earth, while your boots struggle to balance on twigs and your knees try to grip the tree's little weather-blasted top. Every tree is different, but one thing is constant: Once you've strung your rope around the bushy shoots of the treetop, collecting them all together into one, ideally weight-bearing, anchor, and tied your arborists' knot, when you finally have the holy rope to hold you there, the sweating slows, the spit returns to your dry mouth. Then you can settle your weight against the padded waist strap of your harness, and let your flip rope -- the one you climbed the tree with -- hang free, push back your climbing helmet and look around at the surreally beautiful landscape of Montana's Beartooth Plateau stretching forever in the incandescent September sunlight.

This particular tree is a whitebark pine, heavy with a crop of cones. The crown cones in front of your face are the color of dark rich chocolate, encased in sap that protects them from the furious high-altitude light. In the early morning cold, the sap is hard as refrigerated bubble gum. Later, during the heat of the day, it will drip, clogging carabiners, harness and helmet buckles, pocket-knives. It gums your eyelashes shut and tastes like a primitive soap.

The giant yellow vinyl bag you've dragged through the lower thickets of branches, the one they call "the pig," which is always either hung up below you, or on the wrong side of the tree, or so heavy with cones that you cannot move it at all, is empty now. You tie it off with a simple hitch around a branch that looks stout enough to hold it. The carabiner that holds it to your harness is stuck open with sap. As you twist the cones free and drop them into the pig, they land with hollow thuds that remind you that the day is just beginning. Hours of climbing are ahead of you, hours of stripping a sap-hardened rope through your knot as you work down this tree and the next and the next, hours of hauling bushel bags of cones back to the truck or rally point, hours of cold rain or blazing sun, of fear and danger and the joy of being free under the vast eye of heaven, making good money and, just maybe, helping ensure that this species of tree survives.

I'd worked harvesting cones before that morning in 2009, mostly climbing ponderosa pines around Montana, in the Bitterroot and Sapphire ranges and south of Big Timber, and even plucking, twisting, cutting cones -- thousands of them -- from felled trees piled in the dust and heat of a logging unit in South Dakota's Black Hills. But for anybody who has ever spent a lot of time up high at timber's edge -- skiing peaks, scrambling, climbing, wandering -- the whitebarks have a grandeur beyond that of the mightiest ponderosa, or the stately, disheveled western cedars in their shadowy cathedral, or even the ship's-spar of a western white pine, towering over the rest of the canopy.

The whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulus) is mostly found clinging to the treeline -- more or less the last stop in the life zone -- in a core range that extends from the U.S. Northern Rockies into Canada, and some outlying island populations in Washington, Oregon, California and Nevada. They're the sturdiest, most obstinate of trees, scarred by lightning, sculpted and bonsai'd by centuries of the kind of weather that destroys lesser plants and animals. They inspire reverence in every true mountaineer, simply because they embody what is most powerful about alpine climbing: the ability not just to survive, but to thrive under the harshest conditions that this ruthless part of the planet can dish out. I heard recently from an expert that there is a whitebark pine on Railroad Ridge in Idaho's Sawtooths that is 1,275 years old. Yes, indeed.

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The current whitebark crisis alarms Western conservationists: A combined attack by fast-moving native mountain pine beetles and white pine blister rust, a slow disease spread by an invading fungus, is passing over the Rocky Mountains like a grim wind, leaving hundreds of thousands of the trees -- entire subalpine forests, many of them in iconic places, such as around Yellowstone National Park -- in skeletal ruin. A succession of warmer winters, hotter summers and precipitation shifts has left already-stressed trees especially vulnerable to the beetles, which are erupting in the largest outbreak ever recorded. Most of the news headlines shriek about how the beetles are wiping out lodgepole pines, but they pose an even greater threat to whitebarks.

The whitebarks and another high-altitude five-needled conifer -- the limber pine (Pinus flexilis) -- form a cornerstone of the region's ecology. Their seeds, which glisten like bits of ivory-colored lard, are a favorite of grizzly bears and Clark's nutcrackers, as well as of the tough little alpine squirrels on which martens, fishers and raptors prey. The birds carefully pick apart the rock-hard cones to get the seeds, and the squirrels patiently gather thousands and stash them in middens that they then cover with duff, stocked up for the austere winter months to come. Black bears haul themselves into the trees and perch in them, biting cones and extracting the seeds. Grizzlies, not built for arboreal pursuits, simply seek out the squirrel middens, digging them up and eating their fill -- devouring the cones whole.

Whitebarks are an important food source for Yellowstone-area grizzlies, and they also play a crucial role in regulating spring and summer runoff. The distinctive thick "bottle-brush" shapes of these trees and other five-needled pines catch and hold snowfall, and the snow lingers in their shade, melting slowly. When whitebarks die off, snow piles up on the newly unshaded ground, so that warm weather and spring rain bring chaotic floods rather than the gradual quenching runoff produced by a healthy forest. The familiar image of endangered grizzly bears, starving for whitebark seeds and dying in conflicts with men while seeking alternative food in the crowded lowlands, is only part of the bigger picture.

Humanity's role in the whitebark crisis is so clear that it seems to beg for divine retribution: So that the Lord could no longer bear, because of the evil of your doings, and because of the abominations which you have committed; therefore is your land a desolation, and an astonishment, and a curse, without an inhabitant ... (Jeremiah 44:22). But this kind of misanthropy is the featherbed of the modern nature lover, the lazy endpoint of every exhausting conversation about the mismanagement of the world. It's way too easy to be a misanthropist.

And it's wrong, at least in this case, at least so far. Earlier this year, for instance, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ruled that the whitebark pine meets the criteria for protection under the Endangered Species Act. A chronic shortage of federal money means that for now, it won't be formally listed as threatened, but the agencies and conservationists are mustering all their resources on behalf of the trees (see sidebar on page 18). As part of this effort, tree-climbers are paid to fan out in the high-elevation forests, harvesting whitebark pinecones so that the seeds can be used to grow new stands of whitebarks in U.S. Forest Service nurseries. So far, the rate of new planting doesn't come close to replacing the rapidly dying whitebark forests, but it's a start.

I got into picking pinecones thanks to a couple of guys -- Dave and Gabriel -- I met while rock climbing in Kootenai Canyon in the Bitterroots of Montana in 1994. They were both 15, spending long days in the canyon, swimming the creek, lounging on the rocks and sport climbing bolted 5.12s barefooted. I was 31, a trad climber, setting gear that included already-ancient hex nuts that I'd used on the sandstone of Alabama and Tennessee and hauled everywhere, from Yosemite's Tuolumne Meadows to the Bitterroots. I had a worn-out pair of original Fire Boreals -- the earliest sticky-rubber climbing shoes -- clipped to my over-the-shoulder climbing rack, and could climb, at least on top rope, hard 5.9 in my Galibier mountain boots.

When I met Dave and Gabriel, and for long years after, I worked in the woods, thinning timber, logging on private land, and doing everything from treeplanting to digging fireline to building trails on public lands. When Dave and Gabriel reached their 20s, they figured out how to get contracts for the pinecone harvest -- a natural job for an expert climber. In 2002, I found myself, tied-off high in a ponderosa over Sleeping Child Creek in Montana's Sapphires, subcontracting for them.

Back then, we harvested mostly ponderosa pinecones, or spruce or larch cones, for silviculturists who were looking for seed from sturdy, healthy trees to reforest logging units or reclaimed mining ground, or places where fires had burned so hot that, left alone, the land would take decades or longer to recover.

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Those trees are not endangered, so you can climb them more easily than you climb whitebarks -- with heavy spurs that strap to your boots and go up your calves like a brace, with another strap below the knee. You set your spurs into the tree's bark, toss your flip rope around the tree trunk and secure both ends of it to your harness, and move upward, flipping the rope up with you, spurring and climbing. If your spurs slip, the flip rope will catch on something and keep you from hitting the ground, but it's more than a safety device, it's the way you climb, putting your weight onto your harness and leaning back so you can stab your spurs deep into the bark. Scary at first, but the motion feels natural. When you reach a live limb, you grab it, unclip your flip rope, flip it above the limb and clip back in. You are truly safe then, though it takes a while to convince your mind of that.

Once you spur-and-flip-rope your way up to the top of a ponderosa, you set your mainline -- the rope you will use for your descent -- and start sliding down it, harvesting cones and dropping them into the pig. You can use your hands to twist the cones off the tree or use an extendable pole pruner to clip off the cones, which allows you to reach farther to work the tree from a more stable stance without moving around on your rope so much. The farther you extend the pole pruner, though, the faster you exhaust your wrists, forearms and elbows by holding it up and pulling the cord that operates the little cutting jaws at the end. The pole pruner is efficient until it gets clogged with sap. It's also the tool most likely to cause tendonitis in your elbows, while preventing the tendonitis in your wrists that you would get from twisting off cones by hand.

With the radical decline in whitebark forests, though, the harvesting of their cones is done more delicately, making it more interesting, and a bit more dangerous.

No forester in his or her right mind would permit a climber to stomp steel spurs into the last of the planet's whitebarks. You have to tackle the whitebarks in boots or shoes that won't hurt the tree. You can still use your flip rope for safety if you get spooked or exhausted, and let it dangle along behind you if you feel at ease. The one absolute is that there can be no loops, because anything that can snag, will snag, and it will snag at the worst possible time -- Murphy's law rules the heights of rock and ice and tree alike. As you climb, you jerk the pig through the branches, and drag your mainline -- sometimes a special arborists' rope that handles very nicely, or if you're a jackleg part-timer like myself, a sap-blackened old rock-climbing rope, clipped to a steel ring on your harness, right below your belly button, at your center of gravity.

When you get to the top of the tree, you secure yourself to the trunk or to a group of branches, using your flip rope. Then you unclip your mainline from your harness (shuddering, because if you drop it, you lose your finest ally, your partner in all that is safe and good), so you can pass it around a part of the trunk that is at least four inches in diameter, and tie the free end back to your harness, using a bowline or figure-eight knot that has about five feet of tail. Then you wrap that tail three or four times around the part of the mainline that is hanging down to the ground (you hope), making the high-friction, slide-able arborists' knot. You are now "tied in," and if you use your right hand to slide the friction knot down the mainline, you can control your descent, bracing your legs against the trunk or branches, leaning way back into the harness, removing the cones and placing them one by one into the pig instead of dropping them to the dirty forest floor, where they might be spoiled by fungus or other contaminants.

But before you start your working descent, there is usually one more adrenaline-pumping job: Crown cones that must be picked, way up there where the tree trunk is much too slender to support your weight. You must strip the required number of feet of slack through the arborists' knot, make sure that slack is not in your way, and climb up into that treetop. If you fall, if the top breaks out -- and they do -- you will go for a terrifying ride until your mainline catches you. Taking the crown cones is like leading a rock climb, and sometimes, at the end of exhausting days, or in the rain, or on bleary hungover mornings, you have to do it even when everything in your body is screaming, begging you to stay safely on your flip rope, safely tied in, with no slack in the system, no slack anywhere, please Lord.

And for whitebarks, in addition to no spurs, you can't use the cutting jaws of your pole pruner, because they also might damage the tree or transmit fungus or disease. You can only use the pruner as a hook, to pull distant branches toward you to get the cones, an all-day pulling exercise that no rowing machine or wrist-curl bar in any gym can quite prepare you for.

When the pig is full of whitebark pinecones, you lower it so your partner can empty it and bag the cones in burlap, labeled with a meticulously filled-out tag, identifying species, date, place and the number of the tree or area. Then you tote bushel bags to the drop-off point and everything is loaded into a truck for transport to a big walk-in cone cooler at the nearest Forest Service work center.

The pigs are abysmally heavy and awkward when full, and the several-times-a-day lowering of a heavy pig, using a branch as a belay point, burns the kind of calories that can't really be replaced during the climbing season, no matter how much Nutella or cream cheese you slather onto your Fig Newtons, or how many Milky Ways you gobble down.

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2009 was a big pinecone harvest year. I went back to the woods for the best month, starting out Sept. 1 on ponderosas in the dry sauna of the Black Hills of South Dakota, and ending the month with ponderosas in the snow, in the Ekalaka Hills of southeast Montana, with a long stretch in the middle for harvesting whitebarks on the Beartooth Plateau above Red Lodge, Mont.

Dave and Gabriel had been out earlier in the summer "caging" -- carefully placing plastic or metal mesh cages over developing cones on whitebark trees across Montana and into Wyoming. The foresters had picked out what they believed to be the best trees and flagged them with orange streamers, and the climbers then went up, hauling the pig, which at that point contained only a stack of cages and plastic zip ties to secure them on the branches around the cones. Caging has become necessary in most cases -- wild animals love whitebark seeds so much that most trees are stripped of their cones before they fully mature. Too often, a climber who has worked hard to scramble up into an uncaged tree in search of a valuable bushel of cones will find that somebody else got to them first: Clark's nutcrackers, maybe, leaving plundered cones that look like little exploded nut-brown afro-wigs.

Because I came late to the game that year, I missed some of the fun stuff: 50-foot-tall whitebarks in Montana's Flathead forests that grew as straight as lodgepole pines. Those were climbed with a long ladder pressed up against the tree, kept in place with the leverage provided by the climber's flip rope. Foresters hoped that the ladders would be less harmful to the trees than normal climbing methods, but Dave said they were a huge hassle. For one thing, you have to carry them for five miles or more up narrow trails. Then, the bottom of even the tallest whitebarks is usually a bristle-brush thicket of branches, and you simply can't get the ladder flat enough against the tree; the top of the ladder winds up feet away from the tree trunk. So the crew devised another not-very-intrusive method: "For some of those, we used the beanbag," Dave said, "throwing the beanbag with a string on it, way up and through the branches, letting it fall on the far side of the tree, then tying the climbing rope onto the string, hauling it through and over some fairly stout limb or around the trunk, then tying into the rope. Your partner sets up a standard rock-climbing belay, and you hug the tree and head up, busting through the lower branches with your helmet, shimmying and hoping. If you fall before you get to the bigger live limbs, he catches you."

We never really made a camp that September. The work was so scattered across the West that there were few nights spent in the same place. There were four of us by then: Dave, Gabriel, Jeff -- a Bitterroot Valley construction contractor, whom we had all known for years -- and me. I was the only one who had not been making a good living in construction prior to the collapse of '08, which hit the Bitterroot particularly hard. Dave had his own construction business and bought two houses during the boom times. Now his mother occupied one of them, and he was struggling to hold on to the other, where his wife and three children lived. Jeff went into the pinecone harvest business to try to hold onto his house.

There is money in this work: A climber harvesting most varieties of cones, including those from uncaged whitebarks, gets paid by the bushel. In a caged tree, where you might only collect a dozen cones, the climber is paid by the tree. The pay varies, but it beats the hell out of most laborer's or writer's wages; in a good year, when the trees are producing and the Forest Service needs cones, a strong climber can make a few hundred bucks a day.

This was nothing like my other woods work, the tree-planting of the 1980s, say, with its wild anarchist encampments, rife with beer and dope and drifters. Nothing like constructing trails, with the punishing logistics, tools, colossal backpacks, damp tents, tiny campstoves, cosmic levels of effort, innovation and exhaustion. Nothing like firelining, slashing, thinning, where you sometimes work for days alone, earplugs in tight, lost in the alternate universe ruled by the saw, the oil, the gasoline. This whitebark work was climbing, with its total insistence on focus; it was silent, except for whatever songs you could remember to keep you moving. It was not until late in the day that you noticed a sudden irritation with the rope, an enraging branch that lashed you across the face, a pole pruner that you could no longer hold upright, when you realized just how weary and hungry you were.

Nights we went our separate ways to cook and eat and clean up, and then gathered to sit around a small fire if there was a place to build one, drinking beer and telling stories, making plans. Dave was living in his ancient Volvo station wagon, and each night, he unpacked it, setting coolers and cookstove on the roof, and making a space on the folded-down backseats for his sleeping pad and bag. I did the same in my Chevy Blazer, with more room. A lot of nights, we all packed up after supper and convoyed to wherever we would be working the next morning. On those nights, too tired to clear a sleeping space, I just unrolled a pad and bag on the ground, waking later to the shift of the wind and a wild roil of stars. It had one thing in common with the woods work that had occupied so many of my years: It was a life stripped to the bone, lean and weathered, where a drink of water or a bowl of noodles or a cigarette really mattered. I had not lived that kind of life for awhile. It felt good.

I have no real faith that human beings, as a species, are capable of making the kind of choices that might ensure our presence in the distant future. Search as I might, I can uncover few historical precedents to nourish that kind of hope. In the long term, I -- like a lot of the people I know, like the ones I stand around with at campfires after work or hunting, or drink with in bars, or talk with as they walk home from the little church near my office -- foresee a whole lot more trouble ahead. Not just the rapidly unfolding ramifications of climate change, but also the faltering, debt-laden, rigged-with-inequalities economy we've created for coming generations. But in the moment, hope burns hot. I draw much of my hope for the whitebarks from the effort to save them, and the people dedicated to it. Tree climbers like my friends provide for their families while working from before dawn to after nightfall -- what rural Western old-timers call "from can't see to can't see" -- in whatever weather, and doing it day after day while the season lasts. Saving the whitebarks is a tall order, almost lost within the dense matrix of tribulations that we humans have created for so many of our fellow inhabitants on earth. But trying to do it, with all that it entails -- jobs, research, close observation of the systems that, in the end, support every human and non-human endeavor -- is the irrefutably right thing to do. When we are at our best as a species, this is the kind of work we do.

Trapper Peak is the tallest in the Bitterroots, a dramatic 10,999-foot tower of a mountain, like something out of the tales of the Brothers Grimm. There are sub-peaks around it, spires, cirques both hidden and obvious. In the late spring, you can buck old drifts at every north-facing bend in the logging road, and make it all the way to the trailhead to Baker Lake, hike up to snowline and ski to the summit, or jump a backbone ridge and wander the dangerous avalanche and cliff country that lies north and west. There's a secret notch, and if you start at Baker Lake, and skin or kick steps uphill on the steep snow-covered talus, you will emerge at a flat, from which there is a line that will take you straight to Gem Lake, and one of the main couloirs below the peak. In the summer, it's an elk and goat trail. The travel there is easy, among giant monarch whitebark pines that are cartoonishly huge and widely scattered, as if they need isolation even from each other. Most are still alive and thriving, and the sturdy, twisted old skeletons of their predecessors stand there still, their bare wood blasted and polished by centuries of powder snow, until it attains a smoothness and swirling depth of color that seems almost supernatural. I'd like to think that those trees, the living and the beautifully dead, will be around when humanity has moved beyond the juvenile cleverness of today, maybe even attained a kind of wisdom to match the gift of that place. I am working toward that goal, and so are a hell of a lot of other people.

Hal Herring, based in Augusta, Mont., has written about environmental issues for the past 14 yeas for High Country News and a range of other publications including The Economist and Atlantic Monthly. He's a contributing editor for Field and Stream magazine.

]]>No publisherWildlife2011/12/19 01:00:00 GMT-7ArticleA life in the wildhttps://www.hcn.org/issues/43.14/a-life-in-the-wild
Carter Niemeyer's memoir Wolfer is the entertaining story of a government trapper who loves wildlife - especially serious predators like wolves. Wolfer: A MemoirCarter Niemeyer374 pages, softcover: $17.99.BottleFly Press, 2010.

Former federal trapper and shooter Carter Niemeyer, the author of the memoir Wolfer, seems an unlikely advocate for wolves and other predators.

A "wolfer," after all, is a person who kills wolves, a job with its genesis in the great wildlife extermination campaigns that are as unique to our national spirit as their opposites. For every protective law like the Endangered Species Act, there have been a dozen federal programs dedicated to the destruction of wildlife. Niemeyer's title is not ironic; he's killed more than a few problem wolves in his day, along with trapping and gunning down what must be a towering mountain of coyotes. But after reading his book, one comes away thinking that Niemeyer could be nothing but what he is: an advocate for predators and a clear-spoken critic of a system that squanders taxpayer money in hare-brained schemes that benefit a select few while destroying a lot of wildlife. Wolfer is a rollicking tale of a life spent completely immersed in the lives and habits of wild animals and even wilder human beings.

Born in Iowa, Niemeyer is the product of a long American tradition -- that of the born outdoorsman who has more in common with the animals he pursues than with any human society beyond his family. He is a serious predator himself, finding no contradiction in hunting and killing the animals that he loves to watch and study. "What I wanted more than anything when I was 14 was to catch a fox. I was obsessed with it," he writes. Like his fellow Iowan, the hunter and conservation pioneer Aldo Leopold, Niemeyer would live to see a new, more destructive land ethic take hold of his state -- the kind of industrial farming that eradicates everything that doesn't contribute directly to the production of crops like corn.

By that time, however, Niemeyer, with a master's degree in wildlife biology, was living the rough-and-tumble (and far from prosperous) life of a government trapper in the West, wandering from the glaciated plains of Montana to the high-country wilds of central Idaho. Even as the American heartland erased the last vestiges of its wild places, the West was getting wilder, with recovering populations of grizzly bears and wandering disperser wolves. And Niemeyer -- trapping sheep-killing golden eagles, driving epic distances, living out of a camper or a tent, hearing the first rumors about wolf reintroduction -- found himself in the boisterous middle of history, where a thousand revelations into the essence of wolves and human beings, nature and politics, sparked into being. Niemeyer's life during these years, steeped in the blood of predator control and the stink of rotting carcasses, deep in trapping and ranching culture, makes for riveting reading.

Niemeyer's tale is even larger than he is -- and at 6-foot-5, he is formidable enough to be unintimidated by hostile ranchers or trappers. But he never casts himself as the star of the adventures he recounts. Instead, he is a kind of thoughtful everyman, beset by marital troubles, poverty, doubt, befriended by eccentric outcasts, often bossed around by lesser men, rattling along in a bucket-of-bolts old truck, hungry, cold, and always, always, enthralled with the wild animals that he, in the end, serves rather than destroys.

Wolfer is a book for everyone who has heard wolves howling in the wild distance, or longed to do so. It's a book for cattlemen and wildlife advocates and for those who are both, or neither -- anyone who has wondered at the epic tale of wolf recovery in the West. There's no polemic here. In fact, one of the delights of the story is how its utter reasonableness regarding wolves and other predators will infuriate extremists on all sides of the conflict. As Niemeyer said from his home in Boise this past winter, "I got used to the eco-nuts, long time ago, threatening me 'Niemeyer, if you kill another wolf, it'll be the last thing you do!' And now, all I have to do is say something reasonable about wolves, and the full attack is on. 'Niemeyer, the revolution is about to happen and you are on the list! We're gonna get you!' " He then burst out laughing, still amused by it all, after all these years and miles.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesBooks2011/08/22 00:00:00 GMT-6ArticleHow the gray wolf lost its endangered status -- and how enviros helpedhttps://www.hcn.org/issues/43.9/how-the-gray-wolf-lost-its-endangered-status-and-how-enviros-helped
A strategic miscalculation by environmental groups helped spur the delisting of gray wolves in Montana and Idaho.Augusta, MontanaIn September of 1995, I worked on a trail-building crew along the edge of Little Blackfoot Meadows, in the Helena National Forest near Elliston, Mont. It was a big piece of roadless country, mostly lodgepole pines over a lush carpet of whortleberry bushes. The meadows were a sunburnt dun color, and the willows along the braids of the marshy creek glowed deep yellow from frost. In the center of a wide meadow, we noticed what I first thought was a small herd of horses. As the animals moved, their leggy, preposterous gait revealed them to be moose, huddled together, their long heads up and watching. We wondered why they were all bunched up like that. That night, the weather shifted, and the next morning, on a bench above the meadows, two sets of big dog-like tracks showed in the skiff of snow. "Wolves," my boss said. "That's why those moose were acting like they were." I had never seen wolf tracks before. Kneeling to study them, I imagined the pair of wild rovers -- from who knows where, maybe Canada or Glacier National Park -- following ancient paths through the people-less valley. I liked being where the wolves were, in a place where so many of the region's original living components survived. We all did.

No one could have predicted back then that the Northern Rockies wolves -- the 66 introduced into central Idaho and Yellowstone National Park by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1995 and 1996, plus a few that crossed the Canadian border and naturally re-colonized -- would become one of the most successful projects of the Endangered Species Act. Wolves were among the first species sheltered by the 1973 law, and in the years since the reintroduction, their numbers have risen to more than five times the initial goal of 300 individuals and 30 breeding pairs. The success of the reintroduction has made for some excellent, fractious politics. It's also revealed the weaknesses in the strategy of the environmentalists who have used continuous lawsuits to protect wolves.

From the beginning, it was clear that the resurgent wolf population would need at least the threat of legal action to survive. Many of the West's cattle and sheep ranchers and hunters still hail the extermination of the region's original wolves (the last were slaughtered in a Yellowstone den in 1926) as the best way to deal with top-level predators that compete with human beings. Yet the pro-wolf lawsuits have ended in a colossal strategic failure: Congress has just brushed them aside and passed a bipartisan measure that strips Endangered Species Act protections from most Northern Rockies wolves, effective May 5. Suddenly, the whole Endangered Species Act looks vulnerable to more attacks from the law's traditional enemies as well as a surge of new ones. There are lessons we can pull from the apparent ruins.

The thinking of the environmental groups that persisted in filing lawsuits can be summed up: They didn't trust the Clinton administration to manage wolves, then they didn't trust the George W. Bush administration, and then they didn't trust the Obama administration. Most of all they didn't trust the state governments, hunters and ranchers. They believed they could force people to tolerate wolves and refused to acknowledge the other side's point of view -- or at least, the courtroom arenas didn't allow them to acknowledge the other side. They ignored the public's perceptions of their actions, and they didn't see the risk of filing one lawsuit too many.

In April of 2003, for instance, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided to relax protections somewhat by downlisting wolves from "endangered" to "threatened" in nine Western states, 17 environmental groups filed suit, claiming that the decision was not "based on the best available science." The wolf population in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho at the time was estimated at 663, more than twice the original goal. Mike Clark, head of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, one of the groups in the lawsuit, told me recently that the goal of 300 wolves was "just a number selected by U.S. Fish and Wildlife. There was never any discussion of whether that was enough to have a sustainable population, and it was certainly never set in stone." But many Westerners didn't know that the feds' voluminous wolf plans contained a few sentences saying the goal might be adjusted to take into account ongoing research. There was enough science and legal argument on the environmentalists' side that U.S. District Judge Robert Jones in Oregon ruled in their favor, invoking the standard lawsuit language that the downlisting was "arbitrary and capricious."

It seemed like a victory, but it delayed federal efforts to hand wolf management over to the state governments. During the next three years, as wolf numbers rose, science took a back seat to the fury over the notion that the federal government -- the Inland West's favorite whipping boy, especially in rural areas -- was imposing the wolves on hunters and ranchers, on behalf of anti-hunting, anti-ranching environmentalists. That perception wasn't completely accurate, but like the strongest propaganda, it felt true enough to have an impact.

The lawsuit-oriented groups shrugged off any experts who disagreed with their own experts -- including Valerius Geist, a widely respected researcher and author who is also a professor emeritus of wildlife biology at the University of Alberta in Calgary. Geist reveres the North American Model of Conservation, a concept dating back to 1842 that prevents private ownership of wildlife while allowing hunting and fishing within the boundaries of laws set, mostly, by the states. It has been, arguably, the most effective wildlife conservation and restoration model in the world. Geist told me in 2000, while I was researching a story for the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation's Bugle magazine, that wolf reintroduction was "a bad idea. ... Environmentalists have an idealistic vision that there is a balance of nature that can be achieved. What you will actually see is quite a depletion in your big-game (herds)." Geist thinks that "those dickybird fellows" -- as he calls most environmentalists -- do not really care whether the wolves reduce opportunity for big-game hunters, even though the special taxes hunters pay on firearms and their hunting-license fees basically paid for restoring the elk that allowed the wolf recovery: "The enviros have taken a free ride on the money provided by hunters, and they have never paid their share of wildlife costs."

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The pro-wolf lawsuit groups also shrugged off hunters' concerns, by repeatedly pointing out that the Northern Rockies overall have plenty of elk. (The latest totals: Idaho has about 100,000 elk, Montana has 117,880 and Wyoming 120,000.) It didn't seem to matter to them that wolves were taking a heavy toll in some locations. At the end of 2010, there were only 4,635 elk in the famous herd on Yellowstone's northern edge -- a radical decline from the 14,538 elk that were there in 2000. The elk herd on the West Fork of the Bitterroot, in western Montana, had only seven calves for every 100 cow elk, alarming biologists who say the herd won't survive without at least 25 calves per 100 cows. Idaho's long-declining Lolo elk herd was down to 2,000 from a record 16,000 in 1988. There were other factors involved, of course, including the subdivisions taking over Bitterroot winter range and the Lolo forests reclaiming meadows created by previous fires. But an adult wolf eats from 11 to 35 elk per year. To claim that hundreds of wolves were having little or no effect on big game numbers smacked of willful naiveté; it was like the oil and gas industry insisting that the decline of deer and antelope around Pinedale, Wyo., has nothing to do with the 1,400 gas wells drilled on that winter range.

As state wildlife managers try to recover elk herds in places like the Lolo, permits to hunt cow elk are eliminated, infuriating hunters who are accustomed to taking a year's supply of meat from those herds. Hunting families rely on that meat, and the permits mean even more to agencies like the Idaho Fish and Game Department, which relies almost entirely on the sale of hunting and fishing licenses to pay its staff and carry out habitat protection and other projects.

The lawsuit-filing groups also had a mixed relationship with the ranching community, at best. One group, Defenders of Wildlife, reached out with offers of compensation for livestock lost to wolves (a 23-year-long program that was recently disbanded when Congress began allocating money for losses). But mostly the lawsuit groups trotted out statistics showing that wolves were responsible for only a miniscule percentage of total livestock losses. (Coyotes, disease and bad weather are still the major killers.) In 2009, for instance, the region's wolves killed a confirmed 192 cows, 721 sheep, and 24 domestic dogs, and ranchers were compensated with $457,785 from the new federal Wolf Compensation and Prevention Program.

Still, ranchers bore most of the burden of living with wolves. George Edwards, coordinator for the Montana Livestock Loss Reduction and Mitigation Board, estimated that in 2009, losses to wolves in Montana alone ran as high as $1.5 million. Edwards, a Montana native who maintains an even-keeled discourse with both ranchers and wolf advocates, says it's often impossible to compensate ranchers for such losses. "We can pay for confirmed kills, but there's no way to compensate for calves that disappear, or the animals that never gain weight because they are being run, or that are injured running through fences trying to escape, and that's something I hear about all the time." Terri Tew, who with her husband, Tim, manages the LF Ranch near Augusta, Mont. -- known for its wildlife and tolerance of predators -- once told me, "We're not always sure why we should go through all this with losing calves and staying up all night, just so somebody from back East can come out here for a week and listen to a wolf howl." Kathy Konen of Dillon, Mont., probably felt the same way when she arrived in her family's sheep pasture -- on private land -- to find that wolves had killed 120 rams in one night in August 2009. Some ranchers lost priceless breeding stock they'd built up through generations of careful genetic management.

Western Watersheds Project director Jon Marvel -- famed for his uncompromising opposition to livestock grazing on public lands -- was involved in every major lawsuit to protect the wolves. Many ranchers wrongly assumed that Marvel spoke for all environmentalists, so they imagined the pro-wolf groups were out to get them. In turn, the pro-wolf groups fixated on the worst rhetoric in the anti-wolf camps. And there was plenty to choose from: Idaho's Republican Gov. Butch Otter often proclaimed his hatred for wolves, saying he wanted hunters to kill all but 100 of Idaho's wolves, and the Idaho Legislature shrieked that wolf recovery "has no basis in common sense, legitimate science or free-enterprise economics." Wyoming's "wolf management plan" sought to classify wolves as "predators" that could be shot and trapped like vermin in 88 percent of the state.

In their selective use of science, the pro-wolf groups cited research that indicated the region's wolf population in the early 2000s was too small to ensure long-term genetic diversity. When research began to indicate that the population had grown enough to be genetically sustainable, with wolves roaming between the core habitat areas -- a northern Montana wolf was shot chasing cattle in Challis, Idaho, two Yellowstone wolves were killed in Colorado, and so on -- the pro-wolf groups didn't highlight that. Earthjustice attorney Doug Honnold, on behalf of several groups, sent a 35-page letter to the feds in 2007, airing a blockbuster demand: "2,500-5,000" wolves and more Northern Rockies wolf territory would be required to have a genetically healthy and sustainable population. Headlines across the West had a field day with those numbers. More hunters -- imagining 5,000 federally protected wolves eating 30 elk apiece, year after year -- began to find common ground with the anti-wolf extremists.

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State wildlife agencies in Montana and Idaho were eager to take control of wolf management, and all three presidential administrations tried to oblige them. With federal approval of their plans, both states planned wolf-hunting seasons for the fall of 2009, Montana establishing a quota of 75, and Idaho a quota of 220. Thirteen environmental groups immediately sought an injunction to stop any wolf hunts. By the summer of 2009, when all this was happening, the wolf population had increased to around 1,645, with 95 breeding pairs. For many wolf advocates who followed the animals' lives through blogs, or films, or by being among the estimated 100,000 wildlife enthusiasts who came to Yellowstone every year to watch the wolves, it was unthinkable that the states would stage a wolf hunt. There seemed to be no acceptable number of wolves that hunters could take. The outcry against the hunt rose to a melodramatic intensity in pro-wolf groups' action alerts, publications and websites.

The wolf hunt was far more vigorously opposed than the work of federal shooters, who killed 270 Northern Rockies wolves in 2009 alone. There was a reason for that: Federal shooters target only wolves involved in livestock conflicts, while public hunting, even with quotas in specific areas, is an imprecise and disruptive killing tool. But to many Westerners it looked like more hypocrisy. Even when the pro-wolf groups were suing the federal government, they still trusted federal wolf-shooters more than they trusted local hunters or their own state governments.

It was a destructive cycle: The lawsuits inspired increasing anti-wolf fury; environmentalists responded with yet more lawsuits.

In 2008, Idaho's Legislature and Gov. Otter passed a law making it easier for ranchers and pet owners to kill wolves. In December of that year, a blog post by the Natural Resources Defense Council's Louisa Willcox, of Livingston, Mont., treated the pro-wolf lawsuits as if they were Christmas presents: "Let us hope that these capable attorneys can bring light and hope to Northern Rockies wolves -- just as wolves, in return, remind us how to behave as family: hunting together, playing, teaching the young, and surviving the tough times, together.

Ho-Ho-Ho -- or perhaps howl-howl-howl!"

The end result of exchanges like that, as Defenders of Wildlife's veteran Idaho wolf specialist Suzanne Stone said recently, was that "nobody was talking to each other anymore."

In mid-2009, the National Wildlife Federation decided that fighting in court for more wolves was unnecessary and counterproductive. The NWF claims to have almost 4 million members -- mostly hook-and-bullet types -- and 46 affiliated state-level groups. Asked why the group abandoned the lawsuit strategy in 2009, NWF's Northern Rockies regional director Tom France of Missoula, Mont., says simply, "Because the wolf population was recovered." France, who is also an NWF attorney, says he is weary of the battle and the animosity it has caused between groups that are supposed to work together as advocates for wildlife. "The details were less important than moving forward and getting good management on the ground," says France, who continues to work on related issues, especially a long-term effort that has purchased and retired grazing leases on some 550,000 acres of national forest lands where wolves and grizzly bears are in frequent conflict with cattle.

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The lawsuits wound up opening deep schisms between the pro-wolf groups and the hunters' groups that were formerly considered fellow conservationists. The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, for instance, claims to have protected 5.9 million acres for wildlife, with guaranteed public access on over 600,000 acres of private land. But the Elk Foundation shifted to take a hard-line position against wolves, diverging even from the Wildlife Federation's moderate stance. The lawsuit-pushing groups also fueled the ultra-hard-line Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife, which is based in Utah and has chapters in Idaho and Montana. Bill Merrill, president of Montana Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife, says the endless wolf debates had an upside: "The eco-Nazis realized they were losing, and they were right. The tide has really shifted, with the ag and the sporting groups taking the power. The house of cards is really starting to crumble for these environmental groups. We're getting closer to the finish line."

Even worse, the pro-wolf lawsuit groups effectively distanced themselves from the state biologists and other professional wildlife managers that had, for the most part, been staunch traditional allies of protection. It was as if the more extreme environmentalists had decided that even the biologists who worked with the wolves on a daily basis were no longer sufficiently pure in their commitment. Steeped in the righteousness of their cause, the groups believed they could go it alone.

There were some practical problems with the initial wolf-hunting season. In Idaho, hunters were unable to do anything about the wolves that were impacting elk herds in the Lolo area; the wolves were simply too smart, and the country too heavily timbered and rugged, for hunters to kill them. In Montana, nine wolves were killed by hunters in the backcountry right at Yellowstone's northern boundary -- horrifying many wildlife lovers. The dead included the radio-collared alpha male of the Cottonwood Pack, along with his mate, known to researchers and wolf watchers as Number 527, and her daughter, known to wolf watchers as Dark Female. These animals had been celebrated in videos, articles and blogs. They were famous survivors, well-known for battling over territory and killing competing wolves. Laurie Lyman, a retired California schoolteacher who lives in Silver Gate, Mont., and blogs about wolves for the Natural Resources Defense Council, mourned, "These two females recently shot in the hunt (527 and 716) were two of the most interesting wolves I have ever watched in the last five years. What behavior we have seen. ..."

Yet most people involved in wolf recovery saw the 2009 wolf hunt as a beginning. The controversial federal control of wolves in Montana and Idaho was relinquished. The hunt generated revenue for further state management: Wolf-tag sales in Montana alone brought in over $325,000. The wholesale slaughter predicted by pro-wolf groups did not occur. Veteran Yellowstone National Park biologist Doug Smith, whose own research was severely affected by the killing of the collared wolves of the Cottonwood Pack, recognized the inevitability of the hunt. "I thought they did a good job with it. It was very controlled. I respectfully disagree with those people who feel that the long-term survival of the wolf is enhanced by protecting them from hunting."

Extremism has its rewards. For politicians like Gov. Otter, anger over wolf recovery has been a sure-fire vote-getter. Some hard-line hunters' groups gained members and clout as the anti-wolf rhetoric soared, just as photos of gamboling wolf pups combined with hyperbolic warnings about their impending slaughter have generated an increase of members, money and energy for some environmental groups. For many of the major players, there's been no incentive to end the conflict. Montana Wildlife Federation's Ben Lamb, who's worked on the wolf issue for eight years, says, "If this ever gets settled, then the groups that want wolves everywhere, and the people who want every wolf removed from the Lower 48, they'll both have to do something else to get their money. The more broken the policy is, the more money flows to both sides."

In August 2010, U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy, who had refused to halt the hunting season, ruled in favor of the pro-wolf groups on a technical aspect of the law, saying that whether or not the wolf population was recovered in Montana and Idaho, Wyoming still lacked a federally approved plan, and the Endangered Species Act does not permit a species to be delisted on the basis of state boundaries. The region's wolf population -- an estimated 1,706 individuals in 242 packs, with 115 breeding pairs -- was returned to federal control, and a lot more people were convinced that the wolf advocates were being unreasonable. Shortly -- like a chess player who moves the queen into a fatal position -- most of the lawsuit-filing groups realized they'd made a mistake.

As a horde of Western politicians harnessed the anti-wolf fury, determined to get Congress to intervene, 10 of the groups involved in the fatal lawsuit panicked. Suddenly, they sought to compromise, offering a "settlement" that resembled the partial delisting they had previously sued against. There was no chance that Judge Molloy would accept the settlement, because it still enforced the federal law differently in different states and four of the plaintiffs refused to sign it. It was political theater, and Molloy rejected it on April 9.

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Within a few days, Congress approved a bipartisan measure -- a rider attached to a budget bill with no real debate -- that more or less carried out the previous Bush and Obama plans to delist wolf populations in Montana, Idaho, and portions of Utah, Washington and Oregon, while maintaining federal control in Wyoming. The measure also said that the decision cannot be challenged by lawsuits. President Obama signed it, and it was finalized in the Federal Register May 5. Defenders of Wildlife warns: "This unprecedented action marks the first time in the history of the Endangered Species Act that protections for a specific species will be revoked by Congress. (It) paves the way for other bills that undermine the scientific principles of the Endangered Species Act and put countless other species at risk at the whim of politicians."

The rider's key sponsor was Montana Sen. Jon Tester, a first-term Democrat who took the seat in 2006 from a Republican incumbent by only a few thousand votes. Tester, who's also pushing a Montana wilderness compromise bill that hasn't made it through Congress (it's opposed by both left- and right-wingers), says his wolf measure "is a common-sense approach that does not damage the ESA. ... It has the support of all the moderate elements, and it has the support of the wildlife professionals. It's good for wildlife and livestock, and in the long run, it's good for the wolves, too. If we can get the information out, people will understand that this was by far the best way to handle this situation."

The wolf issue has become a defining factor in one of the nation's hottest Senate races: In Tester's run for re-election in 2012, he's facing off against Denny Rehberg, a popular Republican rancher and developer who now holds Montana's sole seat in the House of Representatives. Rehberg has campaigned fiercely against wolves and pretty much everything else environmentalists support.

Tester needs a noteworthy accomplishment to get re-elected at a time when Montana voters are trending hard right, and Democratic Party national leaders need Tester to get re-elected, to help them maintain their slim majority in the Senate. They were eager to help Tester pass his wolf measure, framing it as a moderate solution compared to a doctrinaire, identity-politics Republican anti-wolf bill sponsored by Rehberg (who wants to let Wyoming treat wolves as vermin and end all protection for the Southwest's small, fragile population of Mexican wolves). According to Tester, "The Rehberg bill was too extreme, and everybody knew that. It was dead on arrival."

We're in new territory now. There's uncertainty over how the empowered state governments will manage the Northern Rockies wolves, as well as over how much traction the various breeds of conservationists will have in the future. Montana's Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks says it will likely allow hunters to kill up to 220 of the wolves in the state this year. More Montana wolves will be killed by the federal shooters (who'll still target wolves that prey on livestock), as well as by illegal shooters and cars and so on. By the end of the year, government biologists predict, Montana will still have about 400 wolves, including the new generation of pups. In Idaho, the Legislature and Gov. Otter, indulging in more identity politics, recently declared ... a wolf "disaster emergency" that would allow increased wolf killing, possibly including aerial gunning. But Jon Marvel, the head of Western Watersheds, who refused to sign the "settlement" and condemns Tester's measure, says: "We think that Montana will establish (somewhat) moderate (wolf-hunting) seasons, and that Idaho may try to eliminate wolves in some specific areas, but that, absent the use of poison baits, wolves will survive in the backcountry even with continuous efforts to eliminate them."

Mike Clark of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition says that "the battle over the ESA listing" of Northern Rockies wolves "is over. But the way they are managed will remain very much in play. I think the politicians will eventually step aside, or get tired, and the wildlife professionals will still be there. If it starts looking like there will be a wholesale slaughter, they won't go along with that. And the American people will rise up and stop it, too. I think there's going to be trouble, but the wolves will survive, and we'll find new ways to protect them."

There's also new uncertainty about applying the Endangered Species Act to any other species. Already there's a bill in Congress that would strip protections for the only fly on the endangered list. Sponsored by California Rep. Joe Baca, D, it would let developers occupy the Delhi Sands flower-loving fly's habitat in his district. We'll see more politicking around individual species -- as well as renewed efforts to "reform" the law itself. Reform might be a good idea in some respects, but those who talk most about it just want to gut the law entirely.

The lawsuits on behalf of the Northern Rockies wolves have had one undeniably good result: They kept maximum protections in place for as long as possible and gave the wolf population time to increase to today's levels. And that might prove to be a crucial factor in the long-term success of their recovery.

Meanwhile, three Western environmental groups -- Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Friends of the Clearwater and WildEarth Guardians -- are already suing the feds over the May 5 delisting of most Northern Rockies wolves, charging that it's unconstitutional for Congress to override a judge's ruling. A fourth group that also thrives in court, the Center for Biological Diversity, has filed a separate lawsuit along the same lines.

Hal Herring, based in Augusta, Mont., has written about environmental issues for the past 14 years for HCN and a range of other publications including The Economist and Atlantic Monthly. He’s a contributing editor for Field and Stream magazine.

This story was funded with reader donations to the High Country News Research Fund.

]]>No publisherWildlife2011/06/06 00:00:00 GMT-6ArticleU.S. Northern Rockies wolf graphhttps://www.hcn.org/issues/43.9/how-the-gray-wolf-lost-its-endangered-status-and-how-enviros-helped/u.s.-northern-rockies-wolf-graph
No publisherWildlifeInfographic2011/05/30 00:00:00 GMT-6ArticleOne Way to Save the Wolf? Hunt It.https://www.hcn.org/issues/42.8/one-way-to-save-the-wolf-hunt-it
Montana wildlife managers say the state's first wolf hunt has been a success -- for both the hunters and their prey.The hide from the wolf Carl Lewis shot stretches 7 feet, 9 inches long, the back and ruff as black as a Montana midnight, easing along the legs and flanks to a color that Lewis likens to that of a blue roan horse. Lewis shot the big radio-collared alpha male on his ranch, high on the east side of the Big Hole Valley, last fall. "I really wanted to get a wolf this year," he says, "because we have to live around them, and I wanted to see a few less around our place." Lewis and his family saw wolves 22 different times on their ranch during the past summer, so he knew where to start hunting. "I went out that morning on a fresh snow, and saw no tracks at all. Got up to the top of the ridge, though, and there he was." Lewis shot the wolf from 400 yards with his .338, the rifle he normally uses for elk hunting. Three days later, his son Tanner got a wolf of his own.

Montana's first-ever wolf season was viewed with horror by many environmental groups, and by many people who have celebrated the charismatic predator's return to the Northern Rockies. The hunt was simply too much, too soon, they said; it would kill off the alpha males and females that are the primary breeders and break the slowly building matrix of genetic diversity that is key to the long-term health of the returning populations. They predicted that leaderless wolf packs would go after even more livestock, leading to more wolf-killing by the federal Wildlife Services. The wolves' positive effects on the ecosystem -- keeping coyote numbers in check, scattering elk that were overgrazing their winter ranges -- could be reversed.

But even if those fears proved true, the sheer success of wolf reintroduction made a hunt inevitable, sooner or later. With more than 1,645 wolves in the region and at least 95 breeding pairs, the program had exceeded its original goals of at least 300 wolves, with 30 breeding pairs, every year for over seven years. The population was expanding faster than anyone, even the region's leading predator biologists, could have predicted. Many Montana big-game hunters thought that a tipping point had been reached. "We always knew there would have to be management of wolves," says Carolyn Sime, statewide wolf coordinator for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. "Or people would just start killing them. The question was whether that management would be through the tried-and-true method of hunting, or through government control only, paying the shooters with the helicopters. We wanted the same model that has given us some of our biggest conservation successes with other wildlife."

As Montana's wolf hunt closed in November, the human element -- the pro-wolf, anti-wolf anger that has been so much a part of wolf restoration in the West –– shifted, almost imperceptibly. True, the hunt's critics remained outraged, while those who want wolves eliminated altogether were dismayed that so many were still alive. True, most successful wolf hunters shot their quarry while deer and elk hunting, and most of them, according to interviews, viewed the shooting more as predator control than as a true "hunting" experience. But the stage has been set for a change.

Foremost, the federal government is no longer making the rules. The state of Montana is. But more importantly, among the wolf hunters is a small but growing constituency that sees the animals neither as the sacred burning heart of nature, something to be worshipped from afar, nor as mangy and murderous vermin that deserve extermination. Instead, they view wolves as wild game animals, a quarry worthy of respect –– maybe, someday, even protection. Judging from the past, it is this constituency that will ensure the survival of the gray wolf into the 21st century. "When it comes to big animals with big teeth that eat big things, you have a lot of things to balance out," says Sime. "If you can't develop a broad-based constituency of support for the species on the landscape where the people live with them, then the long-term viability of that species is not good."

Montana's wolf season opened in the backcountry on Sept. 15, and in the rest of the state's current wolf country -- roughly from the Canadian border west of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, south to the Idaho line and east to Yellowstone National Park -- on Oct. 25. According to state game officials, 15,603 hunters bought wolf tags, including 89 non-residents who paid $350 for the privilege (a resident tag was only $19), bringing in a total of over $325,000.

The first day of the hunt was hard on wolves that had never been hunted before: Ten were killed. An average of 20 wolves per week were killed after that. The wolf season closed on Nov. 16, a few days ahead of schedule; hunters had killed 72 wolves out of the 75-wolf quota set by state wildlife biologists, and the quota was about to be surpassed.

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Seven of the slain wolves wore radio collars, putting a dent in research efforts. Still, most people involved in wolf restoration saw the Montana hunt as a success. "We were on the right track with our quota system," says Sime. "Until recently, there's been only two points on the line -- from one side, we got 'kill them all,' from the other side, 'protect them all.' Well, only two points on the line won't work." Sime hopes that the hunting season will "mature the constituency for wolves," inspiring a new generation of hunters who admire and advocate for wolves as game animals. That model worked for mountain lions. Why shouldn't it work for wolves?

From 1872 to 1962, there was a bounty on lions, followed by open season until 1971, when they were finally reclassified as big game. Since then, lion hunters have matured greatly. Whenever deer hunters say more lions need to be killed, lion hunters demand in turn that lions be protected. Montana currently has anywhere from 1,800 to 2,200 mountain lions, and hunters killed 309 of them in 2008. The big cats still inhabit most of their original habitat -- success from a biodiversity standpoint.

Sime believes that those who oppose the wolf season are playing a dangerous game. "You can have wolves as game animals, and hunters who pay to hunt them, or you go with Wildlife Services, and have the taxpayers pay for the control," she says. Wildlife Services is the federal agency tasked with killing "nuisance" animals, including everything from feral dogs that attack people, to coyotes that threaten livestock, to birds that hang out around airports. Federal shooters killed about 145 wolves in Montana last year, out of an estimated population of 524.

George Killebrew, an electrician by trade, is a longtime Bitterroot resident. Born in Mississippi, Killebrew is proud of being part Cherokee. His ancestry, he says, makes him reluctant to hunt wolves or other predators: "My upbringing tells me that maybe these animals are my ancestors, coming back to help us out." But as wolf packs expanded, both around his home near Darby and in most of his hunting country, he bought a wolf tag. "We just really depend on an elk every year," he says, "and we just couldn't seem to find them anymore. Three years ago, we'd see a wolf track or two every once in a while, but this past year, there were tracks everywhere we went ... but no elk."

Wolf howls near their home made Killebrew and his wife uneasy about the safety of their Brittany dogs. On an early morning elk hunt to a favorite spot on the west side of the Bitterroots, Killebrew spotted a single set of wolf tracks along a ridge-top trail. Then he saw the wolf. "She was coming in at about 150 yards, and when she turned broadside, I shot her." Even though Killebrew was using a full-size elk cartridge -- a .300 Winchester Magnum -- the wounded wolf turned and ran. So he shot again, and that time she went down. "At that second shot, she let out a bloodcurdling howl," he says. He does not regret killing her. "There's just too many of them now. They need to have some fear of people, too."

Like Killebrew, many big-game hunters are convinced that rapidly growing wolf packs have devastated Montana's elk herds, preventing hunters from filling their freezers and outfitters from guiding clients to a decent bull. In the Bitterroot, this view is partly right, partly wrong, says state wildlife biologist Craig Jourdonnais, who frequently flies the Bitterroot country, counting elk and deer on their winter ranges. He says that elk numbers in the state remain healthy overall, but that the cow-to-calf ratio in some areas is low, partly because of wolves. "That's definitely a red flag for us," he says. Whenever the cow-to-calf ratio falls too low, the state has to put a halt to antlerless elk hunting. And that, of course, is bad for meat hunters, who tend to blame wolf predation for their empty freezers and higher food bills. Jourdonnais says wolves are not the only reason for the diminished herds, though. "We have so many changes in the Bitterroot," he explains. "A new predator on the ground. All those wildfires. Knapweed taking over, and the chopping up of prime winter range for subdivisions. You might say that we do have a lot of wolves in this valley, and not all of 'em are the four-legged kind. If you are hoping to hunt the same way you did 30 years ago, you are going to be disappointed."

And if you're hoping to hunt the way you did 10 years ago north and west of Yellowstone, you might not even recognize the place. The northern Yellowstone elk herd, once a mighty, and fantastically destructive, 22,000 strong, is down to around 6,600 animals. Cow-calf ratios in the region are at record lows. Hunters and outfitters are furious. But biologists, while concerned, take a different view. "It has taken us 10 years to get that herd down to our objective," says Sime. "There was nothing sustainable at all about 22,000 elk there." Sime adds, "We have some kick-butt Montana wildlife managers still saying, 'Wolves are impacting our wildlife.' Then they'll shift, and say, 'Well, they are impacting elk numbers.' I say 'Where is that happening?' They can never point to the place. It's time for us -- hunters, biologists, all of us -- to recognize that wolves aren't killing the wildlife. Wolves are wildlife."

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Once a sustainable wolf hunt exists, more hunters, and more landowners who have to live with wolves, may begin viewing the animal as just another member of the pantheon of wild animals that need protection and restoration in a world of burgeoning humanity. Wolf reintroduction was possible in large part because generations of hunters provided license money to restore deer and elk herds and preserve habitat. That same support, even at a much lower level (predator hunting has never been as popular as hunting animals valued as meat), could help give the wolf a place on the landscape forever.

What would a successful wolf hunt look like? Perhaps something like the hunt that Mike Ross, a wildlife biologist and wolf management specialist for the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, went on this fall in the backcountry of the Upper Gallatin River.

"I'm 48 years old, and I've been hunting since I was 9, and I've never had a more exciting day of hunting in my life," Ross says. Ross had a coveted permit, one of only five issued, drawn by lottery to hunt bull elk in what may be the world's best elk country. "My girlfriend, Colleen, and I saw some pretty good bulls, but I was looking for at least a 340 (Boone and Crockett). We heard wolves howling in the morning, and after lunch ... 10 wolves came out on an open ridge, flopped down in the sun, kind of belly-up. Colleen said, 'Let's go after them.' "

The two hunters crossed the river and climbed up to where they could see across to the ridge. "But they were gone," Ross says. The wolf pack was hidden in a patch of timber above them when Ross "howled them up." "The woods just opened up," Ross says, "howls everywhere, coming down on us, just wild, and I thought for a second, 'How many bullets do we have?' Then there were wolves below us, too." Ross howled again, and a big male wolf stepped from the timber above them. "He moved around us, and when he came out in the open, I shot him." The 6-year-old male wolf was black and weighed 117 pounds. Ross remains awed by the experience. "If you went out there a hundred times and tried to do something like this, you couldn't do it. It was hunting, you know, where everything comes together all of a sudden. I think those wolves were in a competitive situation with another pack, and they came in like coming into a gang fight. I'll never forget it." Ross says that he "got quite a bit of flak for shooting a wolf, people saying I exploited my job. I don't want anybody to think that. I was out hunting, I had a wolf tag, and we got into them. That's all."

On the map showing legal wolf kills from the 2009 season, there's a dense cluster of dots on the northern border of Yellowstone National Park. It marks the spot where nine wolves died at the hands of hunters on the high, windswept Buffalo Plateau, a world away from the wolf-livestock conflicts of the Madison Valley or the Bitterroot's frenetic urban interfaces. Some of the slain wolves had starred in documentaries made in the park, intimate records of their wild and dangerous lives set to soaring music. The collared alpha male of the much-chronicled Cottonwood Pack was killed, along with his collared mate, known to researchers as Number 527, and her daughter, Number 716, known to park wolf-watchers as Dark Female.

That broke the hearts of many wolf lovers -- the Los Angeles Times wrote a sort of eulogy to 527, as did Laurie Lyman, a blogger for the Natural Resources Defense Council. Lyman called for a buffer zone around the park to protect wolves that spend most of their lives inside park boundaries. Defenders of Wildlife and a host of other environmental groups had already taken their anger at the hunt to the courts, suing to get the wolf back on the endangered species list. Mike Leahy of Defenders points out that between them, hunters and federal shooters wiped out more than half of Montana's wolves in 2009. His organization would like to see 450 wolves in each of the three states before delisting occurs. "I know that asking for more wolves on the land is controversial," says Leahy. "They are a polarizing animal. But what we'd really like to see is for them to be managed as native wildlife, and we don't manage any other native wildlife down to the edge of extinction every year." The lawsuit is pending.

Biologists who study wolves on the ground seem to have a more nuanced view. State game officials shut down the hunt on the northern border of Yellowstone on Oct. 26, just as hunters exceeded by one the area's quota of 12 animals. For Doug Smith, the park's chief wolf biologist, the loss of the collared alphas and four out of 10 members of the Cottonwood Pack was a tremendous blow. "It put a big hole in our research," Smith says. He'd like to see Montana's wolf hunt "tweaked," given how quickly the quota was filled from near the park boundaries. Many other biologists agree. "You basically fill up your quota with wolves in the backcountry, and then no one can hunt the wolves that you really might want to remove, out on private lands, the ones that may be involved in livestock conflicts," Smith says. Hunters, too, complained that quotas were filled too early, preventing them from hunting wolves during the general big-game season in some places. Montana plans to hold another wolf hunt next year, and some of the suggested "tweaks" might be applied. Ken McDonald, a wildlife division administrator for the state, told a reporter, "Again, keep in mind that this was only Montana's first year of wolf hunting. It's still a learning experience for everyone involved."

No one knows how the hunt will affect the survivors' behavior and prospects. "You shoot four out of 10 in a pack, what will they do? Nobody knows," says Smith. "We know that disperser wolves (those that pioneer new territory and start new packs) usually come from large, stable packs, and dispersers are the ones that provide genetic connectivity and eventually keep the animals off the endangered species list. The Cottonwood Pack probably won't be pumping out any dispersers. They are going to stay home, regroup somehow."

But even after the loss of 527 and Dark Female, and faced with the task of capturing and re-collaring new wolves in the Cottonwood Pack, Smith still supports the way Montana wildlife managers structured the first wolf season. "I thought they did a good job with it. It was very controlled. I respectfully disagree with those people who feel that the long-term survival of the wolf is enhanced by protecting them from hunting."

For Carolyn Sime, the questions posed by wolf restoration have been as much about human values and perception as they have been about the wolves themselves. "We have hunters, who have been the greatest advocates for restoring basic stuff like deer and elk, but then it comes to wolves, and they want to get rid of them. We have the animal rights people, some of whom seem to feel that no wolves should die -- ever. Or that if a wolf had killed 527, it would have been OK, but a man with a gun? Unacceptable. I'm hoping that eventually, those who occupy the two extremes will discredit themselves." She cautions that the anti-wolf-hunting groups may unintentionally prove to be the roadblock to restoring the wolf, or even any other endangered species, to more states in the West. "If they want to set the bar so high -- more wolves on the landscape than the people who live there can stand, then no other state will take on what Montana has taken on. Never. Why would they?"

Hal Herring is a contributing editor at Field and Stream magazine and has written for HCN since 1997. He lives with his family in Augusta, Montana.

]]>No publisherWildlife2010/05/10 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticlePut your money where your mouth ishttps://www.hcn.org/articles/money-where-your-mouth-is
Hunters and anglers fork out millions each year to support habitat. Isn't it time other green groups did the same?George Edwards is a pragmatic, easy-going man with a difficult task: compensating ranchers who have lost livestock to a growing population of wolves. He runs the Montana Livestock Reduction and Mitigation Board, a new agency that deals with wolf predation. The agency tries to reduce wolf/livestock conflicts and may someday help ranchers find ways to better live with the wolves that depend upon private lands for their survival. So far, though, most of its missions are on hold, because all of its scant funding is being used to pay for wolf-killed livestock.

Edwards -- like many livestock producers and a growing number of other rural Western interests -- is frustrated. Not only does he not have enough money to mitigate all the effects of wolves roaming private land, but he also believes that the brunt of the costs are being borne by the very same folks who are being impacted the most – ranchers and hunters. Ranchers pay with their livestock; hunters, through licenses and taxes on firearms, pay for the wildlife habitat and the game herds that feed the wolves, whether they want to or not. With the exception of Defenders of Wildlife, which has paid out $1.2 million over 22 years to compensate ranchers for livestock lost to predators, so-called non-consumptive wildlife groups – the birdwatchers, hikers and environmental groups -- have not directly offered any money for wolf-mitigation efforts or to purchase or restore habitat. Except through filing increasingly unpopular lawsuits, these groups end up with little voice in the policy making process.

“These people (environmentalists) have money to spend on lawsuits to prevent anybody from managing these wolves,” a Montana Department of Livestock employee recently told me, “but they never offer a dollar to pay for the damage they cause.”

The losers in all of this are the predators themselves.

It was the money from the 1937 Pittman-Robertson Act taxes on firearms and ammunition that paid for the restoration of big game herds after their near-extirpation in the late 19th century. That game, in turn, has sustained the current wolf reintroduction program. Hunting licenses pay for the state wildlife biologists, and for the habitat and winter range purchases that support the herds. Waterfowl stamp sale revenues bought 5.2 million acres of the federal wildlife refuge system, lands that provide habitat for an estimated one in three of every endangered or threatened species in this country. Taken together, the Pittman-Robertson taxes, the sale of state and federal waterfowl stamps, and the revenue from hunting and fishing license sales contribute an estimated $4.7 million dollars every day to conservation.

Those contributions are simply not matched by wildlife and animal-rights advocates from other groups, whose collective membership numbers in the tens of millions. Yes, they pay federal taxes, which also go into the wildlife pot. But the money is spread so far out that each wildlife lover ends up paying a fraction of a penny for each dollar that a hunter or angler contributes to the cause. Meanwhile, year after year, anti-hunting and allegedly pro-wildlife groups bemoan hunters’ influence over wildlife management, and celebrate the decline in hunter numbers. Yet they offer no methods to replace the lost wildlife and habitat revenues that result from those declines.

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As a result, there are only two constituencies that have any real skin in the game of wolf recovery: ranchers and other landowners, and hunters. Policies for dealing with wolves tend to speak to the concerns of those groups. And that is a shame, because the policies are becoming increasingly ugly. Over the course of several weeks in late 2008, for instance, wildlife officials killed all 27 members of the Hog Heaven wolf pack in Montana’s Flathead Valley. The pack had killed some cattle, and since wildlife officials now believe that killing just the leaders of a pack only disperses the underlings to feed on more cattle elsewhere, they took out all the animals. Idaho Fish and Game Department officials, meanwhile, took the unprecedented stance of saying they would “respond aggressively to chronic depredation” on game animals.

It is only a matter of time before hunting interests across the West demand that wolf numbers be controlled whenever big game numbers fall, just as Alaskan sportsmen have done. State game and fish agencies, which rely on hunter license dollars, can hardly be expected to resist that demand. It should not be this way.

Solutions have been proposed in the past, only to be shot down. The 1998 Conservation and Reinvestment Act, which would have provided $2.8 billion per year for conservation from royalties on offshore oil and gas, was a landmark failure. The Teaming for Wildlife tax, an excise tax on all outdoor-related gear, crashed into opposition from the Republican “no-new taxes” Congress of the mid-1990s. Jodi Stemler, of Denver, Colo., who has worked on wildlife funding issues for the Congressional Sportsman’s Foundation, remembers that, “There was opposition from some of the outdoor industry who said, ‘No, we have a lot of people who buy hiking boots or outdoor gear as a fashion statement, and never go outdoors. And not everybody who spends time outdoors cares about wildlife.’” She added that efforts to fund wildlife conservation with non-game sources have always struggled. “In Colorado, we had the ‘Go Wild for Wildlife’ tax check off, a great idea, great intentions, but pretty soon, everybody wanted in on it, from domestic violence on out. The competing interest groups caused the money to be spread too thin.”

Timm Kaminsky – who has worked on wildlife issues in the West for decades -- has promoted one of the most promising solutions. Since 1995, he has advocated for the creation of a “carnivore stamp” based on the Federal Migratory Bird stamps that waterfowl hunters purchase with their hunting licenses. “We have these extraordinary examples, with organizations like Ducks Unlimited, or the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation,” says Kaminsky. “Right now, you have billions of dollars generated every year, by only about 2 million hunters, and you have at least 60 million people who enjoy watching the wildlife that lives or is supported by those preserved wetlands and other habitat.”

Kaminsky’s goal is to create a way for non-hunters to support the wildlife that they revere. “If you took the 10 principle conservation organizations in Canada and the U.S., and you dropped, say, 2 million of their members, and the rest put up $20 for a carnivore stamp, you would have … $200 million dollars. ... With that amount, we could dramatically shrink carnivore conflicts all over the country.” Landowners and wildlife agencies would then be able to afford innovative and non-lethal methods of protecting livestock from predators, for example, like employing extra range riders, putting up electric fence, or using trained dogs and cracker shells to keep wolves at bay.

The result could be dramatic in other ways, too. Sportsmen would shed some of the burden of paying for non-game wildlife, and non-hunting conservationists would have a real stake -- and a real voice -- in the game. But the first shift would be with the landowners and ranchers. “We must be long past the notion now that public lands are large enough to support large populations of wildlife,” says Kaminsky. “Our most important, healthiest, landscapes are in private hands, and most of them are working landscapes. ... A carnivore stamp represents a public-private partnership where we recognize that, yes, we have a moral imperative to preserve wildlife, and that imperative extends to the people, too.”

Critics say that the idea is far-fetched, even as they acknowledge how desperate the situation is becoming. Laurie Shaffer, of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Federal Duck Stamp Office, says that, in her experience, people don’t buy what they don’t have to. “What you are talking about is a goodwill stamp, or what we would call a ‘Cinderella Stamp,’ which has no other use than as a collector’s piece.” The duck stamp succeeds, she says, because you must have it to hunt waterfowl.

Wyoming already has a version of such a stamp, called the Wildlife Damage Management Stamp. “It hasn’t been a great success at all,” says Kent Drake, Wyoming Department of Agriculture’s predator management coordinator. Yet, the stamp is only sold through the outlets that also sell fishing and hunting licenses, and the people it’s intended for may not be aware of its existence. The current stamp has a drawing of a raccoon raiding a hen’s nest, a far cry from what Kaminsky envisions for the carnivore stamp, with artwork of wolves, polar bears, jaguars and the like selected from artist competitions.

Kaminsky acknowledges that the stamp idea won’t be brought to fruition by the feds. “The people working in those jobs,” he says, “don’t have the sense of urgency that we see every day on the ground.” But until the feds are ready to take on such a program, he says, he will keep pushing the idea, undeterred by skeptics. “There are enough people looking for a mechanism to translate their interest in wildlife into real work to protect them,” he says. “We’ve had all the conflicts between the rural and the urban on this issue that we can stand.”

Suzanne Stone, of the Idaho office of Defenders of Wildlife, says she is not familiar enough with the idea of the carnivore stamp to know if it would work or not. “But we need to bring all the ideas to the table now,” she says. “We have to find a way for all the people to have responsibility. Right now we are stalled, jammed into two groups, and the Idaho Department of Fish and Game is focused on the hunting community exclusively.” Stone says that she suspects that many state game managers and hunters like the status quo. “They don’t want to have to share anything, and they don’t want to consider the desires of constituents other than hunters. But there is a much broader issue here, and that is whether the hunting community will remain the only support system for wildlife,” she says. “I’m just looking forward to the day when the Idaho Fish and Game has a meeting and somebody other than hunters shows up.”

]]>No publisherPoliticsWriters on the Range2009/05/01 18:28:19 GMT-6ArticleTrashing the earth, and the truthhttps://www.hcn.org/issues/40.23/trashing-the-earth-and-the-truth
Hal Herring relates the ugly story of how the Bush administration used its influence to try to kill a story about the impacts of energy development. This is the last time I will ever tell this story. For an environmental reporter, the past eight years have produced a jungle of topics to explore at will, but the lessons learned there could not have been more unpleasant. This is the story of one of those lessons.

In April of 2004, Field and Stream published a story of mine called "Don't Eat that Fish," which described a situation rich in irony: Even as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration were issuing dire warnings about the consumption of wild-caught, mercury-contaminated fish, the EPA was drafting new rules that would ensure that mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants would not be controlled in any meaningful way until the year 2018.

Then-EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt (who had declined to comment for my story) responded with a letter to Field and Stream that said, in part, "Your article echoed many of the inaccuracies that have been used to criticize this proposal. The EPA is charged with writing a regulation that works for an entire industry. Technology is not capable of getting a 90% reduction of mercury for every type of boiler burning every type of coal."

I replied: "The technology exists, right now, to achieve tremendous reductions in mercury from power plants. ... So, what are we waiting for?"

It seemed like a civil exchange of ideas. At the time, I still believed that the administration's policies, whether I agreed with them or not, were legitimate attempts to solve problems. I was wrong. Like so much of what came afterward, I believe that the mercury policy was never intended to address pollution; it was simply a non-policy, a smokescreen written by industry to allow it to do whatever it wanted. Such smokescreens cannot bear much scrutiny. So anyone who questions them must be addressed immediately, with more smoke. I was about to find that out.

Later that year, I went on assignment for the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation's Bugle magazine, for a story about the natural gas drilling boom and its effect on big game habitat. I called to arrange an interview with the Department of Interior's Rebecca Watson, who was then charged with "guiding" energy development on public lands (Ms. Watson later told me that big game animals "went somewhere else" while their habitat was being drilled). The same day I set up the interview, my editor at Bugle called me to say that Peter J. Dart, the Elk Foundation's CEO had called him, and asked why the magazine was doing a story on energy development, and why they were having me write it.

The answers to those questions seemed straightforward. Elk Foundation members, many of whom are outfitters and hunting guides, were concerned about the pace of energy development on public lands, especially on big game winter range, and were appalled that places like Colorado's Roan Plateau and Wyoming's Red Desert were being leased to energy companies with no apparent concern for the land, the watersheds or the wildlife. I had been writing for Bugle for five years and had also covered energy issues for the Economist and the Christian Science Monitor. But Dart, according to my editor, said that I was a "noted critic of the Bush administration" who had "taken many potshots at them in the past." This was untrue.

During my reporting, I was seeing something I had never seen before -- public-land managers who seemed to be working full-time for the energy industry, granting exemptions to almost all of the stipulations on drilling that were meant to protect wildlife or guarantee multiple-use of the lands. But I had not yet published any of my findings. Dart's concern was clearly inspired by his recent trip with other conservation leaders to President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas. Upon his return from Crawford, Dart wrote a column in Bugle encouraging sportsmen to support Bush and his policies, a controversial stance for the leader of a nonprofit conservation group. Dart told my editor that my energy article must not criticize the Bush administration's energy policies, and stipulated that it could not run until after the elections.

----

Two days later, my editor called me again. This time, Dana Perino, then on the President's Council on Environmental Quality and now the White House press secretary, had called Bugle. Perino said she was concerned about my article, because I had previously published "inaccuracies" regarding Bush's environmental policies. Clearly, she intended to cast doubt on my abilities -- and my integrity -- as a journalist. That word "inaccuracies" rang a bell -- it was the same word Leavitt had used to criticize my Field and Stream article. I asked Perino to please contact my editor and clarify what she meant. Eventually, she called him and admitted that she was not familiar with my work and had not meant to attack my reputation. But the message was clear, and had my editor not been a trusted friend, the outcome may have been different. The calls were meant to protect the mission -- in this case, unchecked public-lands energy development on a massive scale. No dissent was tolerated, not even from a self-employed writer typing away in a tiny town in Montana.

"Elk Country and the Price of Energy" eventually ran in Bugle, but not until Dart had sent the manuscript to the White House to make sure it contained nothing offensive. The story lost a section on appliance-efficiency standards that, had they been enacted, would have made drilling some pristine places unnecessary. It was an ugly ending to what had begun as a dream assignment. And it was an ugly time. The leasing of public lands was exploding, the traffic was roaring on the winter range of the Pinedale Anticline, the studies were coming in about the losses of mule deer, pronghorn, sage grouse, solitude. Coalbed methane water, laden with salt, was being dumped into the Tongue and Powder rivers and a hundred lesser streams and coulees. Bulldozers ripped and piled the big sage in the Red Desert, seismic trucks and drilling rigs poured into the strange, lost and iconic places of the West.

The people I interviewed said it better than I ever could. Len Carpenter, a retired wildlife biologist from Colorado, said, "We all tried to play within the system, and at some point we discovered that they were not playing by any rules, they were just throwing our comments and concerns into the waste basket. There is a new power, with no land ethic, who sees what is being done here as normal." New Mexico cattleman Alan Lackey, fighting to preserve his beloved Valle Vidal from leasing, summed it up, "This is a giveaway of public resources at the cost of every other value we hold … the whole plan is like burning down your house to keep warm for one night."

After I wrote about my experience with the energy story in a column for New West, I was out of Bugle for a while. Dart has since left the Elk Foundation, and I am proud to be writing for Bugle again. But we -- America -- will never get back what we have lost in these eight years. Beyond the environmental and economic sacrifices, we have seen our country and ourselves in a disturbing new light. We discovered that there are people in public service who have no trouble rationalizing the destruction of the lands and the wildlife that we trust them to protect. We saw citizens willing, even eager, to toss away the planet's most visionary environmental laws for an ideology, or the promise of a dollar.

Perhaps most depressing of all, we saw that industry was willing to take advantage of the gifts of an extremist administration, that people we thought we knew rushed to sacrifice resources that belong to all of us, simply to ensure greater profits for themselves. Where once, real conservatives (I count myself among them) could pride themselves on the belief that small government and free enterprise could both produce and protect resources, we found that, in reality, that was not the case. To be free of regulation, there must be some shared ethics, some expectation of reasonable behavior and honesty. You cannot expect that someone will choose to plaster the land with a gas well every five acres, as on the Jonah Gas Field, or that they will build tens of thousands of miles of road in irreplaceable wildlife habitat, while arguing publicly that it must be drought that is reducing the numbers of animals on the land. You cannot expect that they will blow up entire mountains and fill creeks with poisonous rocks. A conservative dream died, because it became too perverted to survive.

I am proud that America was strong enough to try to right the mistakes of the Bush administration at the ballot box. But I remain uneasy that we ever made those mistakes in the first place. A government that despises the environment despises all truths. Why was that so very hard for so many to see?

]]>No publisherPoliticsEssays2008/12/22 09:20:00 GMT-7ArticleIt's time for a ceasefire on gunshttps://www.hcn.org/wotr/its-time-for-a-ceasefire-on-guns
Hal Herring believes that Democrats should give up on gun control, not just for the sake of politics but because it’s the right thing to do.Gun owners represent at least 4 million of the nation's most dedicated voters, and in election after election, they affect the outcome. Sometimes they elect politicians who are corrupt or unabashed lackeys of corporate interests — people whose only appeal to gun owners is that they promise to leave the Second Amendment alone.

Now, however, the Second Amendment is more resistant to any politician who might want to mess with it. The Supreme Court's recent Heller decision declared Washington, D.C.'s restrictive firearms laws unconstitutional, thus weakening the power of state and local politicians to control guns or limit gun ownership.

According to Dave Workman, the senior editor of GunWeek, a publication of the Bellevue, Wash.-based Second Amendment Foundation, the Clinton-era assault weapons ban was overwhelmingly supported by the gun control movement. He said "it represented a federal ban on firearms based on cosmetic circumstances — what they looked like — not on their lethality. It was to condition the public to accept a piecemeal destruction of the Second Amendment."

Workman said that there are a lot of pro-gun Democrats now, and gun advocates "are not the one-mind, one-thought Neanderthals that many liberals believe us to be. But the Republican Party remains the party of the gun owners, because the most entrenched Democrats are the old-left, dust-gathering anti-gun, anti-liberty politicians, and when the Democrats have a majority, it puts those people in charge."

The gun vote almost always goes to Republicans for other reasons as well. Gun ownership is highest in rural areas, where self-sufficiency is a virtue, and the Republicans, despite all, have retained the cachet of being the party of boot-strappers. Hunting for meat is a prime example of self-sufficiency, and guns are a part of that sense of self-reliance. One does not give up guns simply because some people use them illegally and create fear and tragedy.

Many Americans value the Second Amendment for a very old reason: as a guarantee that tyranny will be opposed. They believe that the Second Amendment guarantees the existence of all the other amendments, and that, to paraphrase Machiavelli, an armed man is a citizen, and an unarmed man is a subject. That doesn't mean that an American who chooses to be unarmed is any less of a citizen, but if we lose the choice to be armed, we have more or less lost the value of our citizenship.

The gun-rights advocates have their own contradictions, though. They have failed to explain why, if they despise government power, they consistently vote for a political party that has claimed government authority over decisions like abortion, religion and marriage rights. Although gun rights and social conservatism may appeal to the same kinds of people, they are actually two opposing ideas. To hold them both smacks of a citizen who does not really value liberty at all, but wants a government empowered to enforce his or her values on everyone else.

Single-issue gun-rights voters are especially destructive when it comes to environmental issues. Year after year, Republican politicians swear allegiance to the Second Amendment, an act that costs them nothing. Then they support measures to exploit, degrade, and even sell off the public lands and waters that hunters and fishermen depend on. Neither the NRA nor the gun voters themselves do anything to protest this.

The gun vote has gone to anti-environment politicians for so long now that millions of non-hunting American no longer associate hunters with conservation, even though sportsmen have painstakingly restored wildlife and habitat, rivers and lands, with their gun and ammunition tax dollars, their license fees and waterfowl stamps.

This will eventually backfire on gun owners. In a society increasingly disconnected from nature and hunting, with places to shoot growing scarcer all the time, fewer citizens grow up in a traditional gun culture. That means fewer hunters will fund assets like the federal Wildlife Refuge system, and fewer shooters will respond to future, inevitable challenges to the Second Amendment.

It is not too late for a new vision. If the Democratic Party would recognize the Second Amendment as the Supreme Court has interpreted it in the Heller decision -- reassuring gun voters that the years of backdoor maneuvers to promote gun control are over -- the Republican deadlock on the gun vote could be broken. It seems a small price for the Democrats to pay. All they have to do is recognize the Constitution.

Hal Herring is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is a contributing editor at Field and Stream and lives in Augusta, Montana.

]]>No publisherPoliticsWriters on the RangeEssays2008/12/05 12:20:00 GMT-7ArticleWhy we all need the Democrats to abandon gun controlhttps://www.hcn.org/issues/40.19/why-we-all-need-the-democrats-to-abandon-gun
Hal Herring believes that Democrats should give up on gun control –– in order to win in the West and because it’s the right thing to do.At this year's annual Gun Rights Policy Conference in September, National Rifle Association President Sandy Froman endorsed Arizona Sen. John McCain in the upcoming presidential election. This came as no surprise; the Democrats have long been denounced by the NRA as the anti-Second Amendment party — Nanny-State know-it-alls, Big-Government gun-controllers out of touch with the majority of Americans, yearning to impose their vision on a population that wants none of it.

In this election, however, it's not that simple. The U.S. is facing a host of challenges, most of them brought on by the antics of a Republican administration that governed as a team of mendacious plunderers, with no regard for the future, or even for the beliefs that their own party once espoused. The Constitution — the very document that guarantees the right to keep and bear arms — has been treated with scorn. The economy, manipulated by the kind of "crony capitalism" we once despised in less-enlightened nations, is a shambles, at least for the middle class, and our energy policies are the laughingstock of the developed world. Today's Republicans are not just the party of the Second Amendment; they are also the party of the big energy companies. Is it possible, then, that gun-rights advocates might consider voting for someone who is not a Republican?

It's unlikely, unless the Democrats start acknowledging the gun vote and respecting the views of Second Amendment proponents. Gun owners represent at least 4 million of the nation's most dedicated voters. Election after election, they help change the outcome, sometimes electing politicians who are inept, corrupt or unabashed lackeys of corporate interests — people whose only appeal to gun owners is that they promise to leave the Second Amendment alone.

Now, however, the Second Amendment is more resistant to those politicians who might want to mess with it. The Supreme Court's recent Heller decision just declared Washington, D.C.'s restrictive firearms laws unconstitutional, thus weakening the power of state and local politicians to control guns or limit gun ownership. Given that — and given what is at stake in the U.S. today — it may be time for Democratic and independent voters to simply give up on gun control. We have so many more pressing issues to deal with.

For two decades, many liberals have thrived on despising the NRA and its members. Those who believe in gun control often hold enormous prejudice against those who don't. But there are already reams of laws pertaining to the use, abuse, purchase and sale of firearms. What new regulations would the gun-controllers create, and how would they work to address the problem of gun violence? Do they want to prohibit private ownership of firearms altogether? Many would like to ban handguns, without considering just what this would entail, what inequities of power would result, and what new, potentially dangerous, powers would have to be awarded to government to accomplish it. Like activists who want to ban pit bulls, the gun-control advocates remain relentlessly unspecific about what they hope to achieve. It has become clear, too, that these advocates hold a double standard regarding the U.S. Constitution: The First Amendment is vital to the health of a free nation, as is the Fourth, but the Second is respected only by the un-evolved and the violent. Only the parts of the Constitution that their side respects are valid, in this view.

According to Dave Workman, the senior editor of GunWeek, a publication of the Bellevue, Wash.-based Second Amendment Foundation, "The Clinton-era 'assault weapons ban' was more symbolic than anything else. The reason it was so overwhelmingly supported by the gun control movement was because it represented a federal ban on firearms based on cosmetic circumstances — what they looked like — not on their lethality. It was to condition the public to accept a piecemeal destruction of the Second Amendment."

Workman believes there was much to learn from the Clinton election. "When George H. W. Bush took the gun vote for granted in 1992, most of the gun owners voted for Ross Perot, or else they sat it out," he says. The election of Clinton, though, and what followed, cemented the gun voters' dislike of the Democratic Party. The Brady Law went into effect in 1993, and the "assault weapons ban" passed a year later. That was enough, says Workman, for the gun voters to see "how this was all going. They mobilized and threw out many of the Democrats, costing them control of Congress (in 1994)." The National Rifle Association first endorsed a presidential candidate — Ronald Reagan — in 1980, but gun politics as we know them today were born in 1994.

Since then, the gun vote has gone to the Republicans, and that is not expected to change anytime soon, even with pro-gun Democrats like Montana's Gov. Brian Schweitzer or Sen. Jon Tester gaining prominence. "It is not that the gun vote will not cross party lines," Workman said. "We know that there are a lot of pro-gun Democrats now, and we are not the one-mind, one-thought Neanderthals that many liberals believe us to be. But the Republican party remains the party of the gun owners, because the most entrenched Democrats are the old-left, dust-gathering anti-gun, anti-liberty politicians, and when the Democrats have a majority, it puts those people in charge."

Tom Gresham, host of the radio show Gun Talk, recognizes that there are dire problems with the Republican Party. Still, he refuses to vote for a Democrat. "I am proud to be a single-issue voter, and I will not cast a vote to strengthen the party of Nancy Pelosi. Let's look at what it means when any politician says that it is okay to take away any of the gun rights of a law-abiding citizen. It means that they truly believe that we are too childlike to be trusted with those rights, and it means that their attitude of government is that it will protect us from any and every peril. Tangentially, it also means that they want all the power."

----

Of his choice of McCain for president, he says: "We all have reservations, I know. But in the long run, I don't really believe that a president can achieve world peace, or solve all of our environmental problems. But I do know that the president can stop the importation of all firearms, can make the cost of a federal firearms license be $10,000, can put OSHA in charge of firearms in the workplace, can empower the EPA to control lead. The president can do these things without any votes, without Congress. And (Obama) is the most anti-gun politician who has ever run for president. Now he is saying that he supports the Second Amendment, but he can support the Second Amendment and still ban guns."

Gresham says the Supreme Court, which could see the appointment of two new, lifelong justices during the next presidential administration, will be the real battleground. "The Heller decision is the most important decision on the Second Amendment ever made. And it was 5 to 4. With two justices possibly retiring during this next administration, we cannot afford to have them replaced by justices nominated by Obama, and confirmed by a Democratic Senate."

But there are other reasons that the gun vote will go to a Republican. Gun ownership is highest in rural areas, where self-sufficiency is regarded as a virtue, and the Republicans, despite all, have retained the cachet of being the party of boot-strappers. Hunting for meat is a prime example of self-sufficiency, and guns are a part of that sense of self-reliance. One does not give up guns simply because some people use them illegally and create fear and tragedy.

Many Americans value the Second Amendment for a very old reason: as a guarantee, not that tyranny will not happen, but that it can at least be opposed. They believe that the Second Amendment guarantees the existence of all the other amendments, and that, to paraphrase Machiavelli, an armed man is a citizen, and an unarmed man is a subject. That doesn't mean that an American who chooses to be unarmed is any less of a citizen, but if we lose the choice to be armed, we have more or less lost the value of our citizenship. Many gun owners find gun-control advocates naïve when they argue that guns are useless to fight tyranny in modern times. Today's America is not somehow exempt from the kind of oppression that has at times overtaken every other nation on earth, even our own. Gun-control backers act as if we have arrived at the end of history — as if there is far more to fear from an armed populace than there is from anything else that the future may hold.

The gun-rights advocates have their own contradictions, though. As a group, they have failed to explain why, if they despise government power, they consistently vote for a political party that has claimed government authority over decisions like abortion rights, religion, and marriage rights. Few gun-rights proponents address the attacks on civil rights made by the current Republican administration, or explain why those attacks shouldn't matter when it's time to endorse a Republican candidate for president. Although gun rights and social conservatism may appeal to the same kinds of people, they are actually two opposing ideas. To hold them both smacks of a citizen who does not really value liberty at all, but wants a government empowered to enforce his or her values on everyone else. How is this different from the way gun-control advocates want only their values respected?

Single-issue gun-rights voters are especially destructive when it comes to environmental issues. Year after year, Republican politicians swear allegiance to the Second Amendment, an act that costs them nothing, but guarantees the gun vote. Then they support measures to exploit, degrade, and even sell off the public lands and waters that hunters and fishermen depend on. Neither the NRA nor the gun voters themselves do anything to protest this. The gun vote has gone to anti-environment politicians for so long now that millions of non-hunting American no longer associate hunters with conservation, despite the fact that sportsmen have painstakingly restored wildlife and habitat, rivers and lands, with their gun and ammunition tax dollars, their license fees and waterfowl stamps. This will eventually backfire on gun owners — and on conservationists. In a society increasingly disconnected from nature and hunting, with places to shoot growing increasingly scarce, fewer citizens grow up in a traditional gun culture. That means fewer hunters will fund assets like the Federal Wildlife Refuge system, and fewer shooters will respond to future, inevitable challenges to the Second Amendment.

It is not too late for a new vision, one as unique as the nation itself. If the Democratic Party would recognize the Second Amendment as the Supreme Court has interpreted it in the Heller decision, and reassure gun voters that the years of backdoor maneuvers to promote gun control are over, the Republican deadlock on the gun vote could eventually be broken. It seems a small price for the Democrats to pay. All they have to do is recognize the Constitution.

]]>No publisherPoliticsEssays2008/10/27 09:00:09 GMT-6ArticlePredator hunters for the environmenthttps://www.hcn.org/issues/349/17076
The group Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife has helped to
protect a lot of Western land and wildlife – while doing its
best to kill off as many predators as possible

MARSING, IDAHO

"The drawing
for the wolf hunt will be at the very end, so nobody can go
sneaking out early,” says Nate Helm, addressing a crowd of
about 30 men and women at Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife’s
first annual Predator Derby, held in January at the new American
Legion Hall. Helm is SFW-Idaho’s executive director, a trim,
youthful and redheaded man in his early 30s, the former natural
resources coordinator for Idaho U.S. Sen. Larry Craig. Helm’s
wife is busy signing up the entrants to the derby with three of the
six Helm children in close attendance, camo-clad and well-behaved.

The line of contenders includes a local taxidermist and
his contest partner, a plumber from Boise who is originally from
Russia and is new to coyote hunting but a devoted waterfowler; they
are discussing the glories of the oxbows of the Snake River near
Marsing. The taxidermist tells me that he’s in the derby to
save a fawn or two by killing coyotes, and if he can do that, it
doesn’t matter if he wins. Former government trapper Layne
Rio Bangerter and his partner Mike Svedin are at the back of the
line. Someone remarks that Bangerter has just been appointed as a
natural resources advisor to Idaho’s new governor, Butch
Otter, which is no surprise, since Bangerter held the same post for
U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo for more than two years. In a brief
conversation, Bangerter will tell me, “We are normal Idahoans
here, and we want animals to hunt, fish and trap. And we want to
keep Idaho the way it is.”

Everybody’s kids
are running the place hard, marveling at the raffle booty spread
out on the long tables: the bags and buckets of calls and scents,
headlamps and camo-gear and hats and copies of the glossy magazine
Predator Xtreme. (Lead story:
“In-Your-Face Bears: Could You Survive?”) On a table
near the door is an old Mauser-action rifle with one of the
original Unertl sniper scopes mounted on it; most visitors,
including me, study it with fascination. In general, though, the
talk tonight is of wolves, hunting and politics, three subjects
that, for SFW, and for so many people around the West, are like
three pieces of clay, worked and kneaded together into a single
smooth entity.

After a barbecue supper, the presentations
and calling contests begin. Larry Lansdowne, a sales rep for Quaker
Boy, a call and hunting-gear maker, is here to demonstrate some
calling techniques and offer up his advice on how to kill coyotes,
foxes and bobcats in tomorrow’s derby. Lansdowne is a fan of
cowboy-action shooting — hand-gunners who use period-piece
weapons from the 1800s in fast-paced competitions — and he
looks the part, heavy-set, with long graying hair and a black
cowboy hat that has a hatband made of dozens of elk ivories. He
tests a few different calls. “You got a dog (coyote) out
there at a mile, you can challenge …” he says, making
the call howl. “You can go to a ki-yi,” he barks fast,
“or you can go to a hurt pup,” and then he whines.

“A female coyote will get real mama-ish if she
thinks somebody’s hurting her pup,” he says.
“People ask what this call is, or that one, and really,
it’s either something barking or something dying.” He
makes a long dying rabbit squeal. “Follow that with a quick
bark. Make ’em think there’s food, and somebody else is
getting it.”

Once the predators are called in,
Lansdowne notes, shot placement isn’t particularly important.
“You are going for a straight harvest here. It’s about
the numbers, and the more you take out of here, the better it will
be,” he says. “Don’t be tentative, don’t
get discouraged. Even if you fail all day long, it still was better
than going to work. It’s about being able to enjoy Mother
Earth and the things she’s putting out there for us to
use.”

As promised, the picking of the ticket for
the grand prize comes at the end of the evening. SFW member Richard
Scott holds the winning ticket. He and a partner will be headed to
hunt wolves with BOSS Outfitters in Alberta, where, as one
unsuccessful contestant remarked, “There are plenty of
’em, and you can shoot as many as you want.”

The group disperses into the cold night air of the parking lot, in
a whirl of conversation and the rattling start-up of big diesel
pickups, running lights glowing orange. Everyone would be back near
Marsing in 24 hours, to meet at the Homedale Rod and Gun Club and
see who had been most successful at the business of killing all the
predators that were legal to hunt.

In 1993, when
Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife first appeared, Utah
wildlife and wildlife habitat were in trouble.

“Wildlife was going down,” says SFW founder Don Peay of
Bountiful, Utah, who has been called “the Don of
Wildlife” by the Salt Lake City Tribune.
“Our fish and game department was totally out of touch with
the Legislature, with sportsmen, even with the governor. There was
a failure to address habitat restoration on our public lands, a
failure to address predator control. There were so many challenges,
and our game and fish director actually made the decision to
abandon hunting, and move toward watchable wildlife.”

Former Utah Fish and Game Director John Kimball, who was
in the agency at the time, said a convergence of factors was
working against wildlife. “Our deer numbers were way down,
and we were looking at really having to reduce our big game
licenses, which meant we were looking at losing all that license
money,” he said. “Especially from our sales of
nonresident deer licenses.” The low deer numbers were, in
part, the fault of the agency’s management, Kimball said.

At the same time, a coalition of groups, including the
Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, the Rocky Mountain Elk
Foundation and The Nature Conservancy, was involved in an attempt
to purchase two remote wildlife-rich ranches in the Book Cliffs
area, near Vernal.

“A bunch of what I would call
ultra-right-wing cattlemen went in and hammered the fish and game
(department) and said, ‘If you have the money to buy ranches
for wildlife, you have too much money.’ Then they went to the
Legislature and got fish and game’s budget cut even
more,” Peay says.

It was a defining moment for
Peay. He believed that Utah was giving up on something — not
just the Book Cliffs purchase, or wildlife, but the state’s
long hunting heritage — that most residents still valued but
were not organized enough to defend. “We had cattlemen all
over Utah who did not want to see larger deer and elk herds. At the
same time, we were seeing successful moves by animal-rights groups
to shut down predator control and a rising anti-hunting sentiment
in the cities,” Peay says. “We needed a group that
could restore the game and the hunting in Utah. We could let other
groups worry about the spotted owls and the desert tortoises.

“Not that those things are not important.”

Since its founding, Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife has
calved into two entities that have a common board of directors
— Sportsmen for Habitat, a nonprofit charity, and the
original Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife, a nonprofit recreational
club. The Utah-based SFW looks forward to the day when
there’s no need to travel to Canada to hunt wolves.
SFW’s members, in fact, are ready to start the wolf hunt,
right now, in Idaho. So are their counterparts at SFW-Wyoming.
There is a new branch in New Mexico, and SFW hopes to start others.

With close to 10,000 members and a 2005 budget of over
$1.3 million, SFW is the largest and by far the most powerful
wildlife group in Utah. Its two-part structure is also unique among
wildlife groups. According to SFW Treasurer Byron Bateman, the
split was “part of Don’s (Peay’s) original plan.
It was set up so that if we needed to, we could do a lot of
lobbying for our interests.” In the early days of SFW,
Bateman explained, lobbying was a big part of their work.
“But not so much now,” he said. “We have our
relationships built, and we can do the same thing with just a phone
call.” The money from members’ dues and other sources
can still be used for lobbying, but more of it is earmarked for the
group’s magazine, Sportsmen’s Voice, and to pay a small
number of staffers.

Sportsmen for Habitat has no
dues-paying members, Bateman said. It is simply the tax-deductible
arm of the group. In Utah, at least, it stays very busy. Last year,
Sportsmen for Habitat was awarded the first-ever Kevin Conway Award
(named in honor of the former Utah Division of Wildlife Resources
director, who passed away in 2004) for its support of Utah’s
Watershed Initiative, which included extensive (and ongoing) work
restoring native sagebrush habitats across the state.

SFW
has stirred controversy in all the states where it operates with
its unapologetic demands for maximizing big game herds and hunting
opportunities through transplanting species like bighorn sheep into
new ranges; changing hunting regulations to favor trophy-sized deer
and elk; and spending money on predator control, not just to
protect livestock, as it has been traditionally done across the
West, but to protect and increase wild game herds and game birds.

In Utah, Peay has been at the center of the storm, in no
small part because he plays an unprecedented role in lobbying the
Utah Legislature for policies that he and his followers say will
foster a stronger hunting culture and more game animals in his
state. Peay’s many political contributions go to candidates
not generally associated with wildlife conservation, such as
Republican congresswomen Barbara Cubin of Wyoming and Lisa
Murkowski of Alaska and former Massachusetts governor and
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, among others. Peay
is also a strong supporter of President George W. Bush; he’s
visited with the president both at his ranch in Texas and in
Washington, D.C., and penned articles for SFW’s in-house
magazine with headlines like “Conservation George W. Bush
Style.”

Peay’s critics call him arrogant,
“a bull,” and many Utahns interviewed for this story
asked me not to use their names, saying “people are afraid of
him.” And yet, almost everyone interviewed said that Peay and
SFW had a powerful record of success in working on behalf of
wildlife, wildlife habitat and hunting in Utah, a state where, less
than 20 years ago, it seemed as though the citizenry and the
Legislature were content to let their wildlife and heritage of
hunting fade away forever.

----

From reading the
newspapers, a visitor could be convinced that most
Westerners spend their lives worrying about the fate of the land
and its wild inhabitants. Almost nothing could be further from the
truth. In the West, as in almost every other part of the U.S., the
vast majority of the financial support for wildlife, wildlife
habitat and the state fish and game agencies that work to protect
and sustain them comes from hunting and fishing licenses, the
purchase of special hunting permits, taxes on firearms and
ammunition, and the sale of federal and state waterfowl hunting
stamps.

Attempts to set up new sources of money for
wildlife, especially for non-game species, have failed. Most
spectacular among the failures is the U.S. Senate’s refusal
in 2000 to allow a vote on the hugely popular Conservation and
Reinvestment Act (CARA), which would have provided $3.1 billion
annually for 15 years, drawn from taxes on outdoor gear such as
backpacks and hiking boots as well as from revenues from oil and
gas royalties. The funds would have been directed to help states
with projects that ranged from restoring non-game wildlife to
protecting coastal marshes and wetlands. CARA failed, attacked by
private-property-rights extremists and their not-so-secret
industrial backers, who claimed the money would be used to add to
the federal estate or to compete with private interests for
resources. The outdoor industry also is said to have opposed the
act, unwilling to have the prices for its goods elevated, however
slightly.

Year after year, a declining number of
sportsmen have provided the funding to preserve wildlife and
habitat. Hunting groups — the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation,
the North American Foundation for Wild Sheep, and others —
have brought money and carefully cultivated political will to
partner with The Nature Conservancy and other land trusts to
protect the critical big-game habitat that also serves as a redoubt
for other wild creatures.

Anti-hunting groups cite
studies by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service showing that
“watchable wildlife” interests — non-hunting
tourists drawn to parks and rural areas — spend more on their
trips and are an increasing presence, while expenditures by hunters
are declining. But this does not negate a simple reality: The
majority of the wildlife being watched by non-hunters has been
restored and sustained by hunter dollars, paid through the decades
into a variety of revenue streams.

“The non-game
wildlife people don’t have an emotional or financial chip in
this game. Don Peay has connected the dots between industry,
outfitters and the sportsmen — including the very high-end
sportsmen — and he’s delivering that constituency to
conservation, on the ground,” says Amanda Smith of The Nature
Conservancy in Utah, which has become a partner with SFW in
habitat-protection projects. “It is all so much more tangible
than anything that people who just say they love the wildlife are
doing.”

Peay, who has a background in
chemical engineering and an MBA from Brigham Young
University, describes himself, variously, as a management and
financial consultant, a real estate developer and a businessman. He
holds no title at SFW, but works for the group as a consultant. It
is obvious that he has a gift for connections. When reached for
this interview, he was on the way to interior Alaska to hunt
grizzly bears with his good friend Karl “The Mailman”
Malone, the legendary former Utah Jazz power forward. Sources say
that Peay is a friend of U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch, who has represented
Utah since 1977. Peay’s political contributions to the 2004
George W. Bush campaign were sufficient to earn him a place on the
list of Bush “Pioneers,” a status reserved for those
who raised $100,000 or more.

John Gale, a regional
representative for the National Wildlife Federation, has followed
the work and expansion of SFW in New Mexico and in Utah. He offers
one key to SFW’s attraction for many Westerners: “It
(SFW) is so conservative that the membership does not have to worry
about the dreaded ‘greenie’ label, which is so terrible
to be now, in the West.”

Peay insists SFW is
“neither an elephant or a donkey” when it comes to
politics. “But our membership is probably 75 percent
Republican. What would you expect in Utah?” he says.
“I’ve seen these liberal groups that want to fight the
Republicans, and they get nothing done. We are seeing this rise of
the Democrats in the West, and they are courting the
sportsmen’s vote, and that’s good.”

Most of Peay’s political contributions are targeted to
Republican politicians, and sometimes it seems as though SFW toes
the Republican line. When asked about the Clinton-era Roadless
Rule, which would have prevented road development in what remains
of the nation’s public wilderness, Peay says only that SFW
has not taken a stand on this perennial controversy, which has
divided many hunting groups. “We leave that up to our
individual chapters to decide,” he said.

But on the
issue of public lands in general and their value to the future of
hunting and fishing, Peay and SFW have taken an unequivocal stand
in opposition to some Republican policies. When the Bush
administration presented a precedent-setting plan to sell off
300,000 acres of federal land, Peay and SFW were adamantly opposed.
SFW has also bucked entrenched so-called “wise-use”
groups and advocated for more controls over all-terrain vehicle use
on isolated public lands.

John Kimball, the former Utah
game and fish director, says that one of the first successes of SFW
was to push through the requirement for a two-thirds
“supermajority” vote in the Legislature before changes
could be made in laws or regulations affecting wildlife management.
Such a rule was necessary, Kimball and many other Utahns have said,
to keep an increasing urban population from dominating rural
interests by referendum. “We were looking at states like
California, where citizen referendums had been used to shut down
trapping or cougar hunting, and we didn’t want to see that in
Utah,” Kimball said.

Along with the supermajority
requirement, SFW pushed a substantial increase in funding for the
Utah fish and wildlife agency. The new funds have been parlayed
into, among other projects, range and watershed restoration on
public lands, the replanting of native grasses, and the halting of
saltcedar and piñon-juniper invasions.

SFW/SFH has
pushed hard on federal and state land managers to reverse massive
losses — from fire suppression, grazing and development,
including energy drilling — in the sagebrush steppe
ecosystem. That ecosystem sustains not only iconic Western game
animals, such as mule deer, sage grouse and wintering elk, but also
a host of other native species. The group’s close ties with
then Bureau of Land Management director Kathleen Clarke and other
Bush administration appointees are credited with getting the
critical restoration work under way, at a time when the sagebrush
steppe was just becoming recognized as one of the most important
and endangered ecosystems in the West.

Such projects,
like the supermajority requirement, have the support of the
ranching community, because they increase forage for cattle as well
as wildlife. This has created another bridge between SFW and
ranchers, who as a group have been traditionally hostile to efforts
to increase wildlife. And the increase in state funding allocated
to wildlife is now a permanent part of the budget.

“We made the conservative argument that the money was an
investment in the game and the future,” Peay says. But
Kimball soon learned that SFW’s support can come with strings
attached. “We wanted to fund a cougar study in central Utah,
and SFW and the stockgrowers both seemed to think that if you had a
cougar in hand, you didn’t put a radio collar on it, you
killed it,” Kimball says. “We knew that if you had good
habitat, that deer herds can weather some pretty adverse
conditions, and we drew in a lot of different interests on the
study. But SFW — which is a deer and elk group — still
opposed it.”

The emphasis on — some would
call it an obsession with — predator control sets SFW, and
Peay, apart from almost every other sportsmen’s or
conservation group in the West. “To think you can have a
natural landscape with wolves and bears and other predators on it
is romantic, but it’s not true,” Peay says. “As
the West develops, predators will be the straw that breaks the
camel’s back.” Peay notes that studies on Utah’s
Strawberry Reservoir showed that it was red foxes and ravens, not
cattle grazing, that were responsible for low numbers of sage
grouse in the area.

“They went in there and
napalmed the red fox and the ravens,” and the sage grouse
have rebounded, Peay says, without cutting cattle use.

It’s a model of management that Peay thinks can be applied
far more widely, and he does not understand why it is so
controversial. “How can anybody say they are an animal-rights
advocate, and say they want grizzly bears or coyotes or wolves that
eat all the production of the young, tearing these calves away from
the elk?” he asks. “Where’s the animal rights in
that?”

Peay believes that predator control will be
one of the main tools needed to protect big game and other wildlife
as oil and gas development expands on Western public lands, a
process that he views as inevitable. “If you don’t
think we need energy independence, you are wrong,” he says.
“Wildlife is not as important as having 22-year-olds dying
overseas for oil.

“They tell us that 20-acre well
spacing is going to ruin wildlife in Wyoming, but we have mule deer
right here in our neighborhood who live on less land than
that,” Peay says. “Our bighorns that we re-introduced
here in Utah were taken right off a strip mine in Alberta. They
were walking around right next to the D-9 Cats (bulldozers).

“If you have to have wide-open spaces for wildlife,
how come our biggest mule deer are right here in Salt Lake
City?” Asked about largely undisputed government and
energy-company studies showing a 46 percent decline in mule deer on
the winter ranges of Wyoming where energy development was taking
place, Peay replied, “How many of those were lost to
predators? How many were lost because of rangeland deterioration?
Our stand on oil and gas is that there has to be mitigation.
I’ve spent a lot of time looking at this, and I look at data
very hard.

“There are a lot of biologists that are
full of bullshit. They make up a lot of convenient lies to support
their own agenda.”

----

If SFW’s stand on
predator control is controversial, it is the
group’s model for raising money in Utah that has garnered the
most attention from more traditional wildlife advocates, especially
those in the hunting community.

Since 1981, Utah, like
other Western states, has offered special “set-aside”
hunting permits, or tags, for coveted trophy animals like bighorn
sheep rams, mountain goats, cougars, buck mule deer, bears and bull
elk. The tags allow hunting in areas that may be otherwise
restricted to provide animals a better chance of surviving to old
(and, in trophy terms, impressive) age.

In 1981, a Utah
tag for a single trophy bighorn ram sold at bid for $20,000. The
money was used to reintroduce more bighorns to their traditional
ranges. According to Alan Clark, wildlife section chief for
Utah’s Division of Wildlife Resources, there are now 350 such
special tags available each year for auction.

“We
— fish and game — get back 30 percent of that
money,” Clark said, with 60 percent going to whatever group
holds the auction for use in conservation projects. (Ten percent is
kept by the auctioning group to cover banquet costs and other
overhead.) Clark says that the number of tags is kept to 5 percent
of all tags issued to hunters in the state, so the money can be
raised without the public feeling like its hunting rights are being
sold to the highest bidder.

“We have to generate
money for projects,” he said, “and we give the most
tags to the groups that generate the most money with them.”
The leading group in the past few years has been SFW, Clark said.
The idea of raising money by selling what is a public resource is
controversial, Clark acknowledges, and his agency has tried to find
a balance. “SFW pressured us to make more tags
available,” he explains, “but we think that what we
have now, where we set aside a maximum of 5 percent of the tags for
this kind of fund raising, is working.”

Even so,
the program remains controversial in Utah, both because it
represents the privatization of a public resource, and, more
important to many average sportsmen, the set-aside tags come out of
the finite pool of big game licenses.

The money raised by
tag auctions has been impressive — more than $10 million
since 2001, most of it spent on hundreds of habitat projects that
would not have been funded otherwise. And the numbers of game
animals in Utah have been steadily increasing, at least in part
because of those projects.

At the January 2007 Western
Hunting and Conservation Expo held in Salt Lake City — which
was sponsored by SFW, the Mule Deer Foundation and the Foundation
for North American Wild Sheep — the high bid for a single
bighorn ram tag went for the record-breaking sum of $80,000. The
event may have been the single most successful wildlife fund-raiser
ever held. According to SFW’s magazine, Sportsmen’s
Voice, the event raised more than $12 million for conservation
projects in Utah and surrounding states.

The idea that
SFW wants to corner the market on trophy big-game tags dogs the
group as it expands into other states. Bob Wharff, who leads
SFW-Wyoming, came to his job after working as a wildlife biologist
at Utah’s sprawling Deseret Ranch. Wharff says that the
set-aside tags and auctions are one of the first things that
Wyoming hunters — especially game wardens — want to
talk to him about.

“Where we’ve run into
problems is where people misunderstand the model created in
Utah,” he explained. “I have wardens here in Wyoming
kind of threaten me, telling me that if I wanted to try and use
those set-aside licenses here, they would do everything to try and
stop us. But I tell them I came to Wyoming because I wanted to live
here, not because I wanted to change it.”

Actually,
Wharff does not have to spend time defending fund-raising models to
increase SFW’s presence in Wyoming. He just has to find a
bunch of hunters or cattlemen and explain SFW’s position on
the wolf issue.

“We’re not going to sit back
and let hunting be replaced by predators, which is what we see
happening now. I have maintained for a long time that Wyoming has
the right to manage wolves in a different way than other states,
because we have the lion’s share of Yellowstone National
Park, and the park is called, in studies by the government, a
‘wolf nursery,’ ” Wharff says. “This is not
a species (wolves) that ever really needed protection. I believe
that wolf reintroduction had nothing to do with re-establishing the
wolf to its native range. It was about eliminating public-lands
grazing and hunting.”

The traditional
environmental groups that oppose letting the states
control wolf population levels have not generally acknowledged a
powerful irony: It was the decades of hunter dollars flowing to
state and federal game agencies that restored enough of the great
North American game herds to provide the prey base supporting wolf
re-introduction. Many such environmental groups — as many
hunters have suspected and as Don Peay so often says — really
are “anti-hunting groups cloaked in green.”

In Wyoming, the pro-wolf stance of most environmentalists has only
strengthened SFW, which claims to have gathered between 2,000 and
2,500 members since it came to the state in February of 2003. Those
gains make it the second-largest wildlife group in the state,
behind the venerable Wyoming Wildlife Federation, which claims
5,000 to 6,000 members.

“The Sierra Club, all those
organizations, their contributions pale in comparison to what
hunters have done for conservation,” Wharff said. “And
those groups have gotten so extreme. The common man is no longer
able to understand what these environmental organizations want.
They never offer any solutions. They are so far removed from the
mainstream. …

“You can say what you want
about us, like us, hate us, whatever; we have a can-do attitude.
This is a group that is for people who hunt and fish, and who want
to see their grandchildren hunt and fish.”

Critics
respond that a healthy landscape is not just a farm producing more
game and fish for sportsmen to take. Suzanne Stone, a Northern
Rockies representative of Defenders of Wildlife, explained:
“Most hunters that I know value the overall ecosystem, and
how it maintains its health, and I don’t know how you can
miss the basic fact that predators are part of that.” Stone
says her contacts with SFW have been limited, but she knows the
group is a political force. Like other wildlife advocates, she
hopes that the force can be harnessed for good.

“The biggest concern I have with SFW is that there is no
value associated with healthy ecosystems,” she says.
“And their members are being offered actual misinformation
about science and how these ecosystems function. And some of the
most egregious effects on wildlife come from misinformation.”

Stone also worries that sportsmen are not really
represented by some of the SFW’s more extreme anti-predator
rhetoric. “The most extreme voices are being heard loudest
now, and I know so many hunters who do value wildness and predators
— we hear from them all the time,” she says. “But
they are not heard in the media. They were not down at the
anti-wolf rally at the Statehouse.”

To some extent,
SFW has gained popularity by avoiding the most controversial
conservation issues in Wyoming. The state is at the heart of the
explosion in public-lands energy development in the West. There are
a host of contentious issues: the loss of winter range and
migration corridors in the famed Green River Valley; the largest
energy project in U.S. history, now under way in the Powder River
Basin; and the 20,000 oil and gas wells being developed in the Red
Desert, the winter range for the nation’s largest pronghorn
herd and the home of the only desert elk herd known. So far,
however, SFW-Wyoming has issued no position statements regarding
energy development.

Wharff says he has not felt the
pressure to step in yet. “We had Sportsmen for the Wyoming
Range (a group opposed to drilling in those mountains) come to us
and ask us to sign on to say that there should be no oil and gas
development in the Wyoming Range, and that line was too hard. You
ban that, and then what would be next? Ban hunting?” Wharff
says. “I told the outfitters who signed on that they were
nuts. What if you push those guys off, and then the next user group
that is banned is the outfitters?”

Wharff says he
would like the development to slow down. “But most of our
guys don’t think this is as big a threat as some other people
do. Most people that hunt and fish are utilitarian,” he says.
“They believe in using things, and the concept of renewable
resources.”

But there are plenty of Wyoming
sportsmen who disagree with Wharff on that point, given the energy
development they have already witnessed and its impacts on big game
and landscapes. The powerful Wyoming Guides and Outfitters
Association is a part of Sportsmen for the Wyoming Range, and
association member Terry Pollard says his group is far more worried
about energy development on these pristine lands than by the
possibility that someone would try to ban hunters from using them.
“I don’t think that’ll ever be a problem,”
Pollard said. “But if they go up there with those oil and gas
rigs, they’ll devastate the range. We’re about multiple
use, as we’ve always said, but if industry goes in there and
does what they’ve done elsewhere in Wyoming, it’ll just
be a single use. All the others will be gone.”

Instead of contesting energy development, SFW-Wyoming has
concentrated on an issue that first brought it to the state: the
feed grounds maintained for Wyoming’s elk herds.

In
an effort to maintain elk herds without having the animals devour
the forage and hay needed for cattle, Wyoming created the first
feeding ground for elk in 1912, the iconic National Elk Refuge in
Jackson Hole. The idea was expanded over the following decades,
driven by a 1939 law that required the state wildlife agency to pay
ranchers for damage to their lands caused by wild elk. There are
currently 22 state-run feed grounds scattered in Sublette, Lincoln
and Teton counties. About 20,000 wild elk winter on these feed
grounds, sustained on a diet of hay (6,000 to 9,000 tons every
year) and alfalfa pellets purchased from local ranches.

Feeding wildlife to maintain abnormally high numbers has always
seemed questionable to some. But when revenues for wildlife
management depend on the sale of big game licenses, as they do in
Wyoming, there is an incentive to keep herds as large as possible.
For many years, the trade-off seemed acceptable. But brucellosis, a
disease probably brought into the Yellowstone region by cattle
around 1900, spread easily among the closely gathered feed-ground
elk, reaching infection levels of more than 30 percent in one area.
The rate of infection suggested that the feed grounds were time
bombs, waiting for any number of diseases to arrive and, perhaps,
spread to cattle herds.

“The wildlife professionals
all felt that it was time to bite the bullet and phase out the feed
grounds,” says Barry Reiswig, manager of the National Elk
Refuge.

----

SFW has come out strongly for maintaining the
feed grounds. In 2006, Wharff and others claimed that the National
Elk Refuge had underfed the wintering elk the year before and
winter mortalities were unacceptably high. In December of that
year, SFW and local ranchers and outfitters gathered to create
“Hay Day,” a citizens’ solution to the alleged
mismanagement of the Refuge.

The group gathered 60 tons
of hay and delivered it to the refuge, where it was accepted by
Reiswig and his boss, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Regional
Director Mitch King. The rally included a police escort for the hay
convoy, a group recital of the Pledge of Allegiance, and an
appearance by Wyoming state Sen. Kit Jennings of Casper, who is
credited with the “Hay Day” concept.

“We did have some added mortality last year,” Reiswig
says, “not a lot, but some. And then SFW rushed forward and
said we were trying to starve the elk, and they had the Hay Day. It
was a publicity stunt for SFW, and it worked well for them.
Meanwhile, of course, the rest of us are still here trying to deal
with these real problems.

“I’m a big
supporter of powerful sportsmen’s organizations, and
I’m hoping that SFW can lead their members to a more
conservationist view of the world, rather than just throwing out
hay bales or whatever.”

But so far, Reiswig notes,
SFW has not addressed very many wildlife concerns in Wyoming.
“They have shied away from habitat protection, for example,
and with some of the company they keep, I sometimes wonder whether
they actually represent the interests of sportsmen,” he says.

Then he offers an example: “Right now, we have
millions of acres of public land with mule deer and antelope on it,
but elk are barred from ever going there. Instead, they are kept on
these postage stamps (the feed grounds), time bombs for disease.
The stock growers are not economically powerful, but they have
political power, and they have kept the fish and game from buying
any more winter range.

“We definitely need a
powerful sportsmen’s group here. Maybe someday SFW will
become more sophisticated.”

A drive from
Boise to Marsing shows a fantastic transition. The rich
farmland of the Snake River Plain is disappearing under a tide of
new subdivisions, from the very high-end, gated-and-landscaped
developments with names like The Overlake, to a forest of close-set
dwellings called Hubble Homes, purchased by the square foot. The
stores sell phone cards, chilis, horchada, catering to the
thousands of Hispanics who came here to work huge expanses of apple
and apricot and pear orchards and sweet onions and melons, and
stayed on to build the houses and start businesses. Few of these
new immigrants hunt or fish.

It’s a world that
strikes terror into the heart of many a sportsman. Idaho cities are
full of New Westerners, mountain biking, climbing in gyms,
indifferent to or respectful of predators, and disdainful of blood
sports. Worst of all, they are probably open to referendums that
would impose their progressive ideas on a dwindling population of
people they regard as hayseeds.

As in 1993 Utah, the
Idaho Legislature seems to have little respect, and little money,
for the Idaho Department of Fish and Game. State wildlife managers,
not wanting to alienate their best friends, the hunters, have kept
liberal seasons on mule deer, even as the herds decline and the
kind of trophy bucks that inspire some hunters to vote for roadless
areas and habitat protection disappear.

Chuck Middleton,
a livestock-feed salesman and past president of the Foundation for
North American Wild Sheep, says that southeast Idaho’s mule
deer herds — once renowned for massive trophy bucks found in
challenging and isolated terrain — are in trouble.
“They left the mule deer season open so long they got the
biggest kill in history, and ruined our best trophy area in the
state,” he says.

The stage was set for SFW-Idaho,
under the direction of the politically savvy and well-connected
Nate Helm, to take the lead. And politically, the group has clout.
Less brash than Don Peay, Helm has written measured statements
supporting the delisting of the wolf as an endangered species. He
has stopped short of the vehemence of Idaho Gov. Butch Otter, who
declared that all but 100 of the state’s wolves should be
killed and that he was prepared “to bid for that first ticket
to shoot a wolf myself.”

Under Helm’s
direction, SFW purchased a ranch near Arco that was slated to
become a high-fenced shooting operation where clients could kill
buffalo and elk. Already prime mule deer habitat, the ranch has
been improved with plantings of native bitterbrush and the
development of water sources for deer and other wildlife, including
sage grouse. It’s the kind of project that should have
brought the group wide acclaim, especially since Idaho sportsmen
have recently been fighting for new laws restricting the high-fence
trophy shooting industry (and have criticized SFW for not taking a
stronger stand on the issue).

But Idaho has been more
challenging for SFW, in political terms, than Utah or Wyoming. For
one thing, SFW’s critics are more outspoken here. “Our
hunting community is totally opposed to any increase in the number
of tags for sale,” said Kent Marlor of the Idaho Wildlife
Federation. “Once you go down that road, you are headed for
an elitist model of hunting that nobody here wants.”

For Chuck Middleton of the Foundation for North American
Wild Sheep, a longtime partner of SFW, the group’s record in
Idaho has been disappointing. The Idaho Sportsmen’s Caucus
Advisory Council includes 31 wildlife and hunting groups, Middleton
explains. “And SFW is the only sportsman’s group in the
state that is not on it. They were the only wildlife organization
to vote no to a fee increase to support Idaho Fish and Game,
because they want Fish and Game to have no power,” he says.
“They want the power like they have in Utah, where they can
just go to the Legislature and demand what they want.”

Other Idahoans — including Jerry Conley, who was
director of Idaho Fish and Game from 1980 to 1996 — say that
SFW poses a real danger to the kind of wildlife management that has
been so successful over the past decades in restoring and
maintaining big game and other species. “Their solutions are
to take all the money and kill the coyotes, the wolverines, the
mountain lions,” Conley says. “They haven’t had a
positive thought in years. In the long run, I don’t think you
can sustain a group just on negativity. But in the short run, they
are causing problems for our wildlife professionals, who are trying
to do a good job, independent of politics.”

It is an early dusk at the Homedale Rod and Gun
Club shooting range, about 10 miles out of Marsing, along the
highway that leads over a low sagebrush and timber pass and onto
the vastness of the Owyhee Basin. The predator derby entrants are
slow to come in, and the cold settles down. Somebody unloads wood
from the back of a pickup and starts a fire in the burn barrel, and
pretty soon everyone is gathering closer to it, talking about a
recent mountain lion attack in California and about elk hunting,
from one side of Idaho to the other and up again to the timber
country of the far north Idaho panhandle.

It’s been
an unsuccessful day out on the sagebrush steppes, and there are
only two coyotes brought in, one very small. Someone says they saw
a bobcat at daybreak but couldn’t get a shot off. No one is
drinking beer, nobody smoking a cigarette. Nobody mentions the
cold, because most of them have been out in the weather since the
night before, and most have been out in the weather, at work and at
play, for their whole lives. They know how to dress for it, and
mostly, they love it, men and women and children. They’re
almost a different species from the climate-controlled,
screen-obsessed masses of American society.

A boy of
about 14 tells me how he has a place near here that is his
favorite, and he points to a ridge, just now in full darkness, to
the southwest. “If I could, I’d just stay up there and
live,” he said, “go hunting every day. I don’t
like living in town.” Later he will ask me what kind of rifle
I shoot, and whether I think it would be fun to hunt coyotes with a
machine gun. I think about that one for a second, and then answer,
“Yeah, I think it would.” Which is the truth. The group
is getting restless and tired, beginning to talk of home and
supper. The two-coyote team is talking about what they will win.
“Course,” somebody remarks from the burn barrel,
“somebody might pull in here with a dozen before time’s
up.” A coyote actually howls not too far away.

A
big pickup, an ATV in the back, comes rumbling in, and people step
out to greet the team. It’s Layne Bangerter and Mike Svedin,
and they are loaded down with a harvest of coyotes.

One
after another the dogs come out of the back of the truck, to
mounting excitement from the other entrants. Nate Helm looks
relieved; an absence of kills would have made the derby seem less
than successful, especially in the photos taken for SFW and the
sponsors of the contest. The coyotes hit the gravel, lined up, 13
of them, every shape and size, from yearlings to grizzled adults.

Some were clearly taken last night; they are as stiff as
frozen roadkill. The Helm children and other youngsters gather to
study them; one little boy jumps back and forth across the line of
coyotes, overcome with excitement. The animals are shot up, bloody
and matted and twisted, and they have been ruptured inside; a
thick, vinegary death reek rises from them, even in the cold. The
children note this. “They stink!” one little boy
shouts. An adult explains, “They have been shot up
some.”

Bangerter is standing at the fiery barrel,
windburned, relaxed in a heavy camouflage coat, happy. “You
just have to know how to hunt them,” he explains, without
condescension, in response to a question of how they took so many
when so few other hunters took any. He tells a quick story of
bringing in four coyotes at once to the call, the animals spread
out in the sagebrush at different ranges, and managing to take all
four down, shooting a scoped AR-15 rifle.

“I felt
pretty good about that,” he says, downplaying the skill that
it must have taken.

It’s late, and everybody helps
haul the coyotes over on the pavement in front of the shooting
range, while Helm works to hang a sign for the Sportsman’s
Warehouse, one of the derby’s sponsors, as a backdrop. The
photos don’t take long — a low wall of dead coyotes,
blaring banners, a group of outdoorsmen who look like they’ve
had a good day.

Later, I will read something in the SFW
magazine that will stay with me, in a story called “The
Spirit of the Wild, explained by a common man,” by Neal
Christopher, SFW-New Mexico:

About halfway up
the mountain for the second time, I stopped to take a break. With
my heart pounding and out of breathe (sic) it hit me like a ton of
elk meat. I didn’t know what it was at first, but after I
fell to my knees I realized, it’s what Ted Nugent talks
about. It was the Spirit of the Wild. It hit me so deep in my soul,
I stopped and prayed to Lord All Mighty. I sat on the ground and
talked to him like an old friend I hadn’t seen in years.

I didn’t ask him for strength to carry more meat
off the mountain or thank him for the elk I had just killed.
Instead, I gave him thanks for my family and friends. I thanked him
for the opportunity to live in country where I was free to roam the
woods as I choose… .

I asked him to make sure that
sometime in their hunting career, every person that sets foot in
the woods feels exactly what I felt in my heart at that moment. (At
that moment in time my trophy was not the rack or the meat, it was
merely existing in rough country.)

Hal Herring has
written for High Country News since 1998. He is a contributing
editor at Field and Stream and an editor at large for the Internet
newsmagazine New West.]]>No publisherWildlifeArticleIdaho's permissiveness leads to elk on the lamhttps://www.hcn.org/issues/333/16669
The escape of 100 domestic elk from self-styled mountain
man Rex Rammell’s Idaho game farm shows up the foolishness of
the state’s permissive attitude toward the industrySometime in August, 100 or more domestic elk escaped
from a game farm near Rexburg, Idaho, through a hole in the fence.
The elk were bred for their huge antlers, and are known as "shooter
bulls," meaning they’re destined to be shot with bow and
arrow or rifle, by clients engaged in an elaborate fantasy that
they are hunting the real thing — elk in the wild.

The game farm that the elk fled from is called Chief Joseph Idaho.
One can’t help but wonder what the real Chief Joseph of the
Nez Perce Tribe would have thought of that. Idaho game wardens are
trying to kill the escaped elk in a highly controversial control
effort. But even as we speak, entrepreneurs such as ex-Denver
Bronco Rulon Jones have targeted the state as the perfect site for
new or expanded game farms.

The runaway shooter bulls
belong to Rex Rammell, a veterinarian and self-described "freedom
fighter" and "mountain man." Rammell never reported the escapees,
preferring the Idaho tradition of taking care of your problems
yourself — especially when you have a long list of violations
and your farm elk have run off into the surrounding countryside,
where the wild elk of Idaho are in the height of the rut.

Rammell says that he and his family could have recaptured all the
shooter bulls — they’ve repatriated 40 so far —
by luring them into catch pens with molasses-soaked barley. At this
point, says Rammell, state game wardens are to blame for scattering
and killing them. Rammell has not said what he was doing to catch
his elk during those weeks before state wildlife officials drifted
by to check out the rumors of an escape.

Wildlife
officials from Idaho, Wyoming and Montana are worried about
interbreeding and the possible spread of bovine tuberculosis,
brucellosis and chronic wasting disease; Rammell insists that all
of his elk are healthy. We’ll have to take his word for it,
since he has resisted every attempt by the Idaho Department of
Agriculture to test them. Apparently, freedom-fighting mountain men
don’t like to deal with pantywaist government employees.

And in Idaho, apparently, no one forces them to, even
when they have a business that endangers a public resource. Idaho
game farmers lobbied successfully to have their industry regulated
by the Department of Agriculture, because they claimed that state
wildlife officials were hostile to domestic elk farms. It is true
that Agriculture officials have been supportive, even if at times
they did have to issue a few citations. In 2002, for example,
Rammell racked up some $750,000 worth of fines for not complying
with agency rules concerning his domestic elk. But convenient
action by the Idaho Legislature meant that most of the fines were
forgiven.

In Idaho, more than anywhere else in the West,
people get elected to office on the strength of their hatred of
government. Once there, they take grim delight in destroying the
intent of the institutions they have been elected to serve.
Meanwhile, states such as Colorado, Wyoming and Wisconsin are
spending millions of taxpayer dollars in an attempt to control
chronic wasting disease. Walking away from active governing is no
problem, perhaps, as long as you live in a relatively empty region
with nothing at stake. But in Idaho, what’s at stake is the
continued existence of healthy herds of true wild elk.

Idaho is one of the few Western states that has failed to address
the game-farming issue. Now, game farmers like Rulon Jones have
zeroed in, looking for the last best complacent place to build huge
fences, kill off the wild big game inside them, and install
domestic elk for clients to shoot. The experience that they sell,
like any deviant fantasy, is fragile and must be carefully staged.
That’s why Rammell didn’t want to use the orange ear
tags on his elk that would have allowed wildlife agents to quickly
track escapees down. Rammell needs to sell an illusion of the Wild
West, even as his clients kill up-close and in an enclosure.

There is a catch: The kill at Rammell’s game farm
is only guaranteed if you also hire one of Rammell’s guides.
If you dare to match wits on your own against one of those giant,
molasses-loving bulls, there’s no guarantee. Hunting all by
yourself is what the farm’s advertisement calls "the ultimate
challenge."

Rammell says he’ll sue the governor and
anybody else who kills or has killed his escaped elk. Rammell also
says he’s going to run for governor himself. Perhaps the
voters of Idaho face the ultimate challenge, too.

Hal Herring writes from Augusta,
Montana.

]]>No publisherWildlifeHuntingIdahoWriters on the RangeArticleIdaho's permissiveness leads to elk on the lamhttps://www.hcn.org/wotr/16648
The writer says the state's permissiveness toward game
farms led to the current mess: Escaped elk threaten wild elk
herds Sometime in August, 100 or
more elk from an Idaho game farm escaped though a hole in the
fence. The elk were from a domestic herd bred for huge horns and
are known as "shooter bulls," meaning they're destined to be shot
with bow and arrow or rifle by clients who engage in an elaborate
fantasy that they are hunting the real thing — elk in the
wild.

The game farm near Rexburg, Idaho, that the elk
fled from is called Chief Joseph Idaho, and one can't help but
wonder what the real Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce Tribe would have
thought of that. Even as Idaho wardens kill these escaped elk in a
highly controversial control effort, new game farmers such as
ex-Denver Bronco Rulon Jones have targeted the state as the perfect
site for expanded operations.

The runaway shooter bulls
belong to Rex Rammell, a veterinarian and self-described "freedom
fighter" and "mountain man." Rammell never reported the escapes,
preferring the Idaho tradition of taking care of your problems
yourself — especially when you have a long list of violations
and your farm elk have run off into the surrounding countryside,
where the wild elk of Idaho are in the height of the rut.

Rammell says that he and his family could have recaptured all the
shooter bulls — they've repatriated 40 so far — by
luring them into catch pens with their favorite treats of
molasses-soaked barley. At this point, complains Rammell, state
game wardens have scattered and killed them. Rammell has not said
what he was doing to catch his elk during those weeks before state
wildlife officials drifted by to check out the rumors of an escape.

Wildlife officials from Idaho, Wyoming and Montana say
they are worried about interbreeding and the possible spread of
bovine tuberculosis, brucellosis and chronic wasting disease;
Rammell insists that all of his elk are healthy. We'll have to take
his word for it, since he has protested every effort from the Idaho
Department of Agriculture to test them. Apparently,
freedom-fighting mountain men don't like to deal with pantywaist
government employees.

And in Idaho, apparently, no one
makes them, even when they have a business that endangers a public
resource. Idaho game farmers lobbied successfully to have their
industry regulated by the Department of Agriculture, because they
claimed that state wildlife officials were hostile to domestic elk
farms. It is true that agriculture officials have been supportive,
even if at times they did have to issue a few citations. In 2002,
Rammell racked up some $750,000 worth of fines for not complying
with agency rules concerning his domestic elk. But convenient
action by the Idaho Legislature meant that most of the fines were
forgiven.

In Idaho, more than anywhere else in the West,
people get elected to office on the strength of their hatred of
government. Once there, they take grim delight in destroying the
intent of the institutions they have been elected to serve.
Meanwhile, states such as Colorado, Wyoming and Wisconsin are
spending millions of taxpayer dollars in an attempt to control
chronic wasting disease. Walking away from active governing is no
problem, perhaps, as long as you live in a relatively empty region
with nothing at stake. But in Idaho, what's at stake is the
continued existence of healthy herds of true wild elk.

Idaho is one of the few Western states that has failed to address
the game farming issue. Now, game farmers like Rulon Jones have
zeroed in, looking for the last best complacent place to build huge
fences, kill off the wild big game inside them, and install
domestic elk for clients to shoot. The experience that they sell,
like any deviant fantasy, is delicate and must be carefully staged.
That's why Rammell didn't want to use the orange ear tags on his
elk that would have allowed wildlife agents to quickly track them
down now that they've escaped. Rammell needs to sell an illusion of
the Wild West, even as his clients kill up-close and in an
enclosure.

There is a catch: The kill at Rammell's game
farm is only guaranteed if you also hire one of Rammell's guides.
If you dare to match wits on your own against one of those giant,
molasses-loving bulls, there's no guarantee. Hunting all by
yourself is what the farm's advertisement calls "the ultimate
challenge."

Rammell says he'll sue the governor and
anybody else who kills or has killed his escaped elk. Rammell also
promises that he'll run for governor himself. Perhaps the voters of
Idaho face an ultimate challenge, too.

Hal
Herring is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org).
He is a writer in Augusta, Montana.

]]>No publisherWildlifeWriters on the RangeEssaysArticleThe Killing Fieldshttps://www.hcn.org/issues/315/16076
The first bison hunt in 15 years was supposed to offer
hope for a reasonable solution to Yellowstone’s
‘buffalo problem,’ but a lifelong hunter who watched it
says the senseless slaughter continuesA buffalo hunt turns into a slaughter on the border of Yellowstone National Park. But could this be the key to setting the animals free?

---

The flayed elk carcass lies on a table in a cold sideroom of a borrowed and makeshift house north of Gardiner. The stacks of rich steaks and Tupperware containers of tough grinder meat are lined up like a display of the world’s oldest kind of wealth. Mike Mease is working fast to take the last of the meat from the bones. Tomorrow is the first Saturday in December, and many of the lucky hunters holding the 50 bison tags issued by the state of Montana will surely be coming to claim their trophies and their meat. Mease and the rest of the Buffalo Field Campaign will be there, too, as they have been since the hunt began on Nov. 15, to bear witness to this latest evolution in the state’s quest to deal with the unending buffalo "problem."

Mease is one of the founders and the main force behind the Buffalo Field Campaign. He coordinates groups of volunteers who come to Montana to try to convince the rest of the nation that the world’s last free-ranging herd of bison deserves something better than to be classified as livestock and tormented and slaughtered every time it leaves the snowbound high country of Yellowstone National Park.

Mease and his band of self-proclaimed "buffalo hippies" are always described in the media, and in the bars of Gardiner and West Yellowstone, as "animal-rights activists," and that is what they are, if by that term you mean people who devote a lot of their time to drawing attention to wrongs done to animals like the buffalo. He killed this latest bull elk while walking around the Eagle Creek country above Gardiner before Thanksgiving. For an animal-rights activist, locals agreed, he got a pretty nice elk.

Mease has been living the life of the Buffalo Field Campaign for nine years, based out of his tepee near West Yellowstone, arguably the coldest place in Montana. He has been a kind of professional enviro-meddler ever since I’ve known him, wandering the world from his base in Montana. He finally came to rest in Yellowstone after the grandiose buffalo slaughter of 1996-’97, when a series of storms followed by warm winds and rains created deep snows glazed with an inch of hard ice, and every big animal east of the Divide was on the move, following the ancient traces and paths to lower ground, to places where the wind scoured the snow away from last year’s grasses, dried on the stem and heavy with life-saving protein. Winter range. Without it, wildlife in the Rockies does not exist.

That winter was tough on all the big game, but the buffalo fared the worst. Deer and elk walked freely across the national park boundary, but the buffalo stumbled into a state policy that condemned them to death if they stepped across the line. The reason, according to ranchers and their advocates in the Montana Department of Livestock, was brucellosis. As many as 50 percent of the nearly 5,000 Yellowstone buffalo may have brucellosis, a disease that was brought to North America by European cattle, which spread it to bison and other wildlife. It can cause spontaneous abortions in cattle, and give humans a nasty recurring malaria-like illness.

As everyone knows by now, there has never been a recorded case of buffalo transmitting brucellosis to cattle, but studies show that it could happen. And that presents the people trying to manage Yellowstone’s buffalo with a conundrum: Because of the high infection rate, the state only tolerates the animals on small parcels of winter range. But the high concentration of the animals each winter is the reason the infection rate is so high.

The results of that conundrum — which described in print looks so sanitary, such an interesting topic for biologists and researchers and wildlife managers to puzzle over — are fiercely ugly. In those early days of 1997, 1,079 of the buffalo that left the Park were shot or rounded up and slaughtered. Of those that the Department of Livestock chased back into the Park, 1,300 starved to death. Every year since has brought similar, if smaller-scale, debacles.

During that hard winter, Mease found what he considered to be a calling — to bring attention to a problem that seemed to be ripe for fixing, if only enough people looked at it and realized that it was so clearly broken, so clearly causing an unacceptable level of real cruelty to a beast most Americans outside the cattle industry look upon with reverence. He set up his tepee in West Yellowstone, and settled in for what has become a very long haul.

Mease learned early that if he brought a video camera down to watch the efforts of the Montana Department of Livestock, agents handled the buffalo with a lighter hand. Since that discovery, he and a revolving roster of volunteers have followed the employees of the Department of Livestock as they’ve raced about, winter after winter, hazing buffalo away from anywhere that they might conflict with cattle, using snowmobiles and four-wheelers and helicopters while the taxpayers’ money flies away like the snow under the wild rush of wind from the rotors, and the rest of the wildlife trying to winter in the area flees in wild-eyed terror.

----

The Buffalo Field Campaign volunteers have met with Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, filed hundreds of reports on their website, been on television and the radio and in the newspapers. They argue that the buffalo, which are obviously wild animals, should not be classified as livestock, and should not be under the control of the Department of Livestock, an entity that has no reason whatsoever to protect them or advocate for them, and one that puts its employees in an impossible position with its absurd, never-win policy.

The volunteers also point out that the buffalo are hazed away from pretty much the whole Yellowstone ecosystem, even though there are actually very few cattle there. Meanwhile, wolves and grizzlies, and other big game like mule deer and elk, are for the most part free to roam. This, despite the fact that brucellosis is having a field day in elk, especially in Wyoming, because the elk are concentrated and their numbers are kept artificially high by state-run feedgrounds that substitute for winter range that’s all being claimed by cattle (HCN, 12/26/05: A desperate move to protect cattle ranchers). And unlike buffalo, elk have actually transmitted the disease to cattle.

Mease thinks the difference in how the elk and the buffalo are treated goes deeper than the brucellosis issue, that even if there were some way to control the disease, buffalo would still be persecuted. "If you watch them long enough," he says, "you see how strange they are, how wild. Whether people recognize it or not, they respond to that wildness, and a lot of people just can’t stand it. They want to control them, keep them in the park, or get rid of them. It’s a kind of prejudice, and it’s tied in to why they were wiped out in the first place."

Since 2003, the state of Montana has been trying to figure out how to have a new buffalo hunt. Residents want it. They see the buffalo hazed and run and shot and sent off to slaughter, and they look in their empty freezers or at a blank space on the trophy room wall, and mutter, "Why not me?" But it has not been an easy sell. The notion of "fair chase" is hard to establish when it comes to buffalo, because they live most of the time in the park, amid hordes of tourists, and have no fear of people. Even when they ruled the American Plains, they were as likely to face enemies by standing firm as to thunder away. They are not pronghorn, not whitetails.

Montana’s old buffalo hunt was brought to a halt after a particularly big kill during a stretch of harsh weather in the winter of 1990-’91, when the media picked up photos of buffalo sprawled in bloody snow, of men dressed up like Buffalo Bill firing big-bore pistols into the buffalo’s heads at point-blank range, of steaming supersized guts loosed from broad black bellies while other buffalo nosed in, wall-eyed, to see what the heck was happening. The hunt looked more like a slaughter. It was too much, too messy, it was bad for Montana public relations. The next winter, the Department of Livestock took over the job of harassing and killing.

After years of consideration, Montana announced that it would reinstate a hunt in the winter of 2004-’05, but the hunt was cancelled after a wide range of wildlife officials and others pointed out that, since buffalo management policy had not really changed, any new hunt would be conducted while livestock agents hazed the animals to and fro. It might look even worse than 1991.

But in 2005-’06, the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks decided to go ahead with a hunt, setting up a lottery system for 50 permits. A total of 6,177 people applied for the tags. The hunt would run in two stages from Nov. 15 through Feb. 15. Livestock agents would take a break from hazing the animals during the three months that the hunt ran, and they would refrain from hazing on an additional 30,000 acres up Eagle Creek, allowing for more hunting territory and more room for the animals.

Mike Mease and the Buffalo Field Campaign say they support the newly revived hunt, if it proves to be the lever that moves buffalo policy out of the black hole that it has been in for the past 15 years. But the cold truth of the matter is that the 2005 buffalo hunt looks an awful lot like the 1991 buffalo hunt — same bulls standing around watching the same hunters pile out of their pickup trucks and take aim from 30 yards, same blood-stained snow and gutpiles of epic dimensions. What has changed is our own capacity to understand just how badly a big, wild and unique animal can be treated when subjected to the cold realities of an "interagency policy" that has institutionalized fantastic cruelty and failed to seek any new remedy. We have been shown, winter after winter, that there are plenty of fates that can befall a species in a human-dominated world that are worse than being hunted.

But inviting Montana hunters into the house of such an obviously dysfunctional policy might ultimately prove very dangerous to business as usual for the buffalo-management crowd.

There is a road up Eagle Creek, just north of the park, in the sagebrush and grassland hills just above the town of Gardiner. The Eagle Creek Basin is one of the few bits of winter range where the buffalo are tolerated. Not surprisingly, it is where the bulk of the killing has been done in the hunt this year.

There is a road through the basin, leading to a dead end in higher country just short of the open Doug fir and lodgepole forests. The buffalo hunters need the road, because buffalo are so big that getting them out after you kill them is a major operation. But the road makes the hunt feel a bit odd, too, because there are a lot of buffalo grazing along it, wandering up and down it, and standing beside it. They gaze Zen-like into nothingness, their long tongues lapping in and out, breath like smoke in the cold. They stand there in their dignified and inscrutable immensity, a posture they maintain, other than a long, untroubled swing of the head to regard the man with the rifle, right until the bullet kills them.

----

The buffalo hunter calls himself "Mr. Mike" and he’s retired from the Boston police force, and lives in Billings. He walks with a cane and moves slowly from injuries sustained in a crash that ended a high-speed chase, years ago. He’s shooting a .270, which is light for buffalo, but sufficient in the right hands, which Mr. Mike happens to have, since he does a lot of benchrest and other kinds of shooting. He has just walked up to the edge of this Forest Service horse pasture, perused the two immense bull buffalo standing 100 yards behind it, rested his rifle on the fence, and slammed a bullet into the 2-inch-by-2-inch space behind the biggest one’s ear. The bull dropped straight to the ground. It was a kill so clean that it was lauded even by some Buffalo Field volunteers watching from a nearby ridge with binoculars.

Mr. Mike is unfazed by the presence of the Buffalo Field Campaign people and their act of witness; he’s unfazed by the utter unblinking and condemnatory silence of the tall bearded young man in a long wool coat, who points his video camera at Mr. Mike as if, rather than recording his hunt, he would like to erase him from the scene. Mr. Mike is a fast-talking, story-telling man, unabashed South Boston accent. He’s happy about taking down the bull, telling me right off that he’s planning to write about his buffalo hunt for the Safari Club Magazine, in a section he writes about big-game hunting opportunities for the disabled.

We walk out into the horse pasture, focused on the dead bull’s sidekick, a not-much-smaller buffalo that is standing off to one side, tail half-raised. If a buffalo’s tail goes straight up, people tell me, the rule is, "it’s gonna charge or discharge." I’ve got on what now feels like a garish blue jacket, and am hoping I am not going to be remembered as the fool who was flattened during the first buffalo hunt of the 21st century.

"You can’t haze these things," says the man who takes care of the property. As we try to do just that, one of the local boys who has volunteered to help Mr. Mike with the formidable task of gutting and caping the bull adds, "These are the stupidest animals on earth." But Mr. Mike is unfazed by that pronouncement, too. He’s listening carefully to one of the Buffalo Field people, a clean-cut man who works in the park as a naturalist and is explaining why they are documenting the hunt, what they would like to see changed about the way the state treats buffalo.

Mr. Mike, it is clear to me, is exactly the kind of hunter who might understand that, in order for hunting to have any meaning, you have to give a little bit to the game animals. He is about to lay out almost $2,000 to have the bull mounted, and, as he sits on it, rifle in hand, for the trophy photos, he’s proud of the beast, proud that it’s an old bull with a thick coat of hair that looks six inches deep, hair that is bleached by years of sun and the winds of the high country, proud of the scar on the bull’s flank that we decide was received in some violent contest with another bull. It may sound odd to a non-hunter, but there is respect there for that bull. It is the kind of respect that has translated into the American wildlife conservation ethic, arguably the strongest and most unique conservation ethic in the world — an ethic that has so far not been applied to the buffalo.

While the volunteer helpers discover just how difficult it is to field dress a 1,900-pound animal with skin like a six-ply tire, Mr. Mike and Mike Mease exchange addresses, so that Mease can send him a video of his hunt. They shake hands, and we leave, just as the local boys start chopping at the bull’s pelvis with a single-bit axe somebody has produced.

Farther up the Eagle Creek road, a bullet struck a buffalo bull somewhere around the left side of his head and knocked him down, rolled him, the witnesses told me, so that his feet were straight up in the air. Then the bull got up, and a second round drove him down again. The boy was shooting a .270 like Mr. Mike, but he was hitting just a little bit off, maybe because the rifle was sighted in for 100 yards or more, and they were much closer than that to the bull. A little bit off would put a fairly light bullet up against the heaviest mammal skull that North America has to offer.

When we first get there, the shot bull is up again, and climbing straight up the face of a barren ridge about 500 feet high. He never runs, but his shuffling progress, huge shaggy head bobbing up and down, is deceptively fast. He hits the top of the ridge and disappears while the boy who shot him stands there with his father, his sister and his brother, in the snow and sagebrush beside the road, watching him go.

On the other side of that ridge is the big basin of Eagle Creek, sprawling and undulating sagebrush country, the ribbon of willows enclosing the creek at its center, fingers of aspen at its perimeters. The shot bull crosses the spine of the ridge and bears on uphill, through little knots of wintering mule deer, below a small band of elk. His tracks in the snow merge with the tracks of dozens of other buffalo, some of which raise their heads to watch his inexorable progress. There’s no blood trail, and we drive up the road, following a game warden’s truck, hoping to be able to tell the hunting party, when they arrive, which of the many buffalo out there is the one that needs a finishing bullet.

----

The road dominates the basin, and there are few places that are distant from its access. The wounded bull comes up onto a small flat and stops about 75 yards below where we parked. He joins a little bachelor group of three other bull buffalo that are grazing there, near a frozen gutpile left over from a bull killed earlier in the week. The orange-clad hunting family is far away, brilliant dots against the snow, and slowly closing. Other trucks join us; one of the animal-rights people has given a ride to the sister of the boy who shot the bull, and the boy’s mother pulls up in another truck with Bozeman plates.

The wounded bull stands on the flat, its tongue slowly lapping at the air. With binoculars, you can see some blood splashed down the side of its head in the thick hair below the ear. Magpies whirl and chatter in a nearby clump of serviceberry, crossing to the gutpile and then back again, looking a bit frenetic in comparison to the ravens that occasionally soar by, commenting with a simple, slow croak.

The people gather. Dreadlocked volunteers from the Buffalo Field Campaign, clad in Army surplus woolens, videotape the boy and his brother and father as they labor up the snowy steep to the road, their hats off, sweating through, silent and intent. The family meets at the tailgate of their truck, and then the father and the boy begin an exaggerated and utterly unnecessary stalk down to the wounded buffalo, which is standing motionless with the other bulls. The volunteers follow, just far enough behind to avoid the appearance of hunter harassment — a green Forest Service enforcement truck has joined the long convoy along the road, the officer in wraparound sunglasses and equipped with a no-nonsense AR-15 in the gun rack.

Two other trucks pull up, a local outfitter and his passengers, just out to see the hunt, and a group of men dressed up like movie gunfighters in spotless cowboy hats and long dusters. They, it turns out, have come to shoot one of the bulls themselves, though they keep that to themselves as they stand in the road and joke with a wiry, middle-aged Field Campaigner named Canyon.

The boy lays his rifle across a backpack for a rest, and takes aim. (Mike Mease later tells me he suggested to the boy’s father that they try a heart shot, since that has been more successful in the hunts they had witnessed so far. The man, out of patience, replied with an obscenity.) The video cameras roll, and the boy shoots. The bull lurches, steps forward, and then falls, rolling over onto its side, its legs straining, relaxing, straining again.

And then I witness something that I have not seen before, in 30 years of hunting elk and deer and just about everything else, of seeing domestic cows and goats and pigs shot.

The three remaining bulls stop grazing and slowly walk over to the bull lying in the snow. They put their heads close to him and breathe out great clouds of steam. Their tails go up, not quite straight, but like a shepherd’s crook, and they make some odd grunting noises. Then they circle the downed bull. And keep on circling.

Canyon, who told me earlier that he was an "enrolled tribal member," and has not, until now, witnessed a buffalo being killed, says, "They are circling just like we do when we go into the sweatlodge, clockwise, like the world turning!"

I stand and stare, transfixed. Mike Mease comes up onto the road and tells me that that almost every one of the kills has been just like this. "A lot of times they’ll hook them with their horns to try and get them up," he says, "and they’ll circle. Somebody who was with us earlier said that elephants do this, too."

The bulls show no inclination to move off, or to resume grazing. They face the hunters and stand, tails up, as if they are made from dark stone, as if they will be there like this until the end of winter, or the end of time.

The boy’s mother comes down the road to where everyone is standing and asks if somebody can please help them haze the bulls away. She is a strong-looking woman, at home in the cold and the snow, and she is obviously upset. She has tears in her eyes. "I’m not really your stereotypical hunter," she says, uncomfortable, but clearly trying to make a connection with Field Campaigners, trying to see if such a thing is possible. It is. Canyon steps up to her and hugs her, and she hugs him back.

Below us, her son and husband begin walking toward the bulls, and the boy fires his rifle into the air. Some of the Field Campaign volunteers head down the slope to help try to move the bulls. The downed bull waves its feet, suddenly. About a minute later, the boy shoots it again, from a distance of a few feet.

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When I went down to the Yellowstone in December, my hunting season was finished, with two mule deer and a yearling elk hanging in my barn, and a gift antelope in the freezer. My plan had originally been to accompany one of the buffalo hunters, offering to help with gutting and packing meat in exchange for a first-hand look at the hunt. I had more than one friend who applied for the tags — one of them, an old hunting and working buddy, was planning to shoot the buffalo with some kind of huge rifle that he called "Numa." I even thought seriously about applying for a tag myself, and looking for a yearling.

Leaving Eagle Creek that afternoon, I asked myself whether I would have wanted to shoot one of those buffalo, video cameras, dreadlocked witnesses and oddballs in gunfighter get-ups notwithstanding. The answer was no, but I wasn’t exactly sure why.

Less than a month later, in early January, the hunt was halted temporarily, while crews from the Department of Livestock honored their commitment to the management policy by hazing buffalo that were trying to enter the public lands on the west side of the park. There are never any cattle on these public lands in the winter, but the policy has a zero-tolerance stand regarding buffalo on them. And so the livestock agents went to work.

On Jan. 12, a team of snowmobiles forced bands of buffalo out onto the ice of Hebgen Lake, where 12 of them crashed through into five feet of water. The photos circulated, the video from the Buffalo Field Campaign was suitably gut-wrenching, the big heads of the animals sticking up from the water, the thrashing, obvious terror. And the snowmobiles in the background, the motorized human tormentors, who of course rushed to save the drowning buffalo in an hours-long effort with a chainsaw and ropes, rescuing all but two of them. The 10 lucky survivors were hazed back to the park.

The next week, it was announced that there were 651 captured buffalo in the pens on the east and west sides of the park. According to a story in the Bozeman Chronicle, 347 had already been sent to slaughter, and 34 calves were sent to a quarantine pen in Corwin Springs, north of Gardiner. Two buffalo had died in the traps. The 264 animals that remained in the capture pen would be shipped to slaughter as soon as possible. Would they be tested for brucellosis? No. Was this population control, since the "Interagency Bison Management Plan" had selected the seemingly arbitrary top number of 3,000 buffalo for the park? "This is not population control," park spokesman Al Nash told the Chronicle. The story did not answer what it was that the capture and slaughter was meant to accomplish. The impression was that there was no answer.

But in the photos of the buffalo struggling in the freezing lake, and the accounts of the captures, I at least answered my own question about why I did not want a permit to hunt buffalo. I wanted no part in the buffalo hunt because there was no buffalo hunt in 2006. Instead, there was simply an accelerated campaign of torture and harassment, and a lottery to see which 50 Montana hunters would be invited to join in.

Perhaps the various agencies involved in buffalo management believed that if we were given the opportunity to kill some of the buffalo ourselves we would be less likely to protest the cruel stupidity of their never-changing non-solutions. But I’d like to think that they made a miscalculation. I’d like to think that after we were invited in to see the animals themselves and the policy under which they suffered that we would decide to change the whole equation.

It is clear that the tireless efforts of the buffalo hippies need to be augmented by the short-haired, big-game hunting, SUV-driving advocates of wildlife and habitat that have already done so much for wildlife and habitat and wildlands all over the West. We know that there is no hunt, in these modern beyond-subsistence (for most of us) days, unless it involves giving something back to the wild animals, giving them room, advocating for the places that they and the other nations of wildlife, live.

Those buffalo calves sent to that quarantine pen in Corwin Springs can gaze out across the mighty Yellowstone River and look right at one of the most important purchases of land for wildlife ever made. In 1999, with the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation as the driving force, the U.S. taxpayers paid $13 million to acquire 5,262 acres of land from the Church Universal and Triumphant, all of it a crucial migration corridor for the northern Yellowstone elk herd and all the other wildlife of the area.

But the larger effort to open the area to migrations hit a snag. The deal to buy the Church’s grazing rights stalled when the price went to $2.5 million, almost five times what the federal government and other players believed that they were worth. The Church has maintained a herd of cattle there, so while the elk and mule deer and wolves and bears roam the corridor, under the current policy, the bison are excluded.

Beyond that land, the west side of the Paradise Valley opens up, to the great valleys and open parklands of the Gallatin Range: Cinnabar Creek, Tom Miner Basin, Rock Creek, and on and on, some of the finest wildlife country left on earth, huge expanses of it public land, more than capable of supporting the Yellowstone buffalo at its current population level. Allowing buffalo to roam freely there would require some concessions. But buying out grazing leases, paying for conservation easements on private lands, asking landowners for a certain amount of patience for wildlife — all of these ideas are working right now across the West. The amount of energy and money that hunters and other conservationists have put into them speaks volumes about who we are as a people, and what we value, when we are at our best. To say we cannot work around Yellowstone National Park for buffalo is defeatist, a repulsive exercise in stagnation.

There is no place on earth more capable of being the landscape within which a buffalo hunter could feel, and be, free and proud. It does not matter if hunting buffalo is not as difficult as hunting a big bull elk. "Fair chase" does not mean that you pursue only the wiliest and most secretive of the game. It is about taking meat or a grand old horned beast from a species that has been treated fairly, to the absolute best of our ability, in all its elements.

It is certainly not the killing of the buffalo up Eagle Creek that is ugly. This is Yellowstone, after all, the personification of nature red in tooth and claw, watered with blood and fed on raw meat and steaming gutpiles, the great wheel of life and death spinning here as nowhere else, the ravens overhead and the wolf always right out there beyond the circle of light cast by our fires. The killing of the buffalo by hunters right now feels ugly, the "hunt" feels controversial because the quarry as a whole is being treated with a combination of contempt, cruelty, and worst of all, indifference. Until that is changed, there will be no buffalo hunt, no matter how many tags the state issues.